Stop Romanticizing Poets 2K14

This is how I write my poems:
You’re blonde and you have blue eyes.
You’re the perfect subject for my next great hit,
a long rambling epic or a two page sonnet
which would start by comparing your hair
to rays of the sun and your eyes to the ocean
at daybreak. Even if you’re more of a dishwater blonde
than sun-colored, and your eyes are less ocean and
more sky, I swear I write this poem and think
vaguely of you.

But here is a secret: I’m not writing a poem about you.
I’m writing a poem about the idea of you.
And I don’t know if it will be a love poem or
a break-up poem or a “please don’t go home and
commit suicide” poem or one of those
heartbreakingly honest poems that feels like
you put your pencil on paper and bled.

I don’t write poems like that often.
No poet does, not really,
we write poems about you and your blue eyes
because we don’t like how bleeding feels,
and it is much safer for us to pretend to fall in love with the
span of your fingers over our chests as we exhale
poetry that ghosts over your lips before falling into the dip
of your collarbone and pressing its words into your heart.
To be honest, we are hardly ever honest with you.

No, seriously, date one poet and you’ve dated them all.
Next time you get a love poem from a poet built out
of pretty words and prettier promises, look at
the eraser smears, look at the crossed out words—don’t
ignore them because in the next line you are compared to a
nebula. Study them until you realize that poets care more about
syntax and diction than they ever will about you.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t fall in love with poets.
I’m saying that you have blonde hair and blue eyes and so
do millions of other people in the world. I’m saying fall in love with
the poet, not the poems he slips into your locker when you’re
trying not to look like you’re looking. I’m saying that
you do not embody the world, that it is not your job to rise
with the eastern sun like a phoenix kissing the world good morning.
I’m saying that all you are is human.
That is the kind of special that doesn’t make good poems.

But if you write that down and repeat it
over and over and over again, you won’t need poets
to tell you about the lightning rod of your spine
and the weather veins in your wrists.  You already will know
this, be able to feel the energy thrumming through your body.
You believe it, you become it, you make yourself
into the most beautiful poem you’ve ever read.
You don’t need poets.
We need you.
We need you to think that the only way you’ll ever be
special is if we tell you about the beauty of your soul,
about how big space is, how tiny you are,
how fucking incredible it is that your eyes are blue
and your hair is blonde.

Stop listening to poets. Be satisfied with your own
flesh and blood and bone. Love the dirt crusting your fingertips,
the scars marring your skin. Breathe and take another step.
Remind yourself to look at things for what they are.
You are real. And that is better than any poem
that a poet will ever manage to write.