A Poem About Heartbreak

I could couch this poem in any manner of metaphor

Take your pick

How about plate tectonics?

Crust rent asunder – the substrate to your super-narrative

How about butterflies?

Forty-eight hours to live and wreak havoc on everything around you

Or bullet ants

Woven into an Amazonian initiation glove

Temporarily tranquilized by shamanic smoke

Only to wake up in a biting stinging frenzy of self-actualization

But no

You don’t deserve literary devices

Poetic subterfuge will simply edify your ego further

Truth is

You’re your own natural disaster

Unworthy of insect similes or geological symbolism

After all the ant dies when the glove is discarded

The butterfly falters and fades, leaving only melted wings and empty cocoons in its wake

Plates collide with continents

But you get to go on being you, insouciant you

You and your Gospel of Luke and your daddy-issue flotsam

Yahweh, Vader – take your fucking pick

It’s all the same to the plebs left behind

The unseen casualties of your catastrophegraph

Now just another set of muddy footprints

On my weather-worn tatami

Yet another prick through the packing sheets of snap-crackle-pop monogamy

Calculated breakups in the name of destiny fulfillment

No arc, no character development, no shimmering soliloquies

I’m not your plot device – and you don’t get your pick of mine

And if your dreams of love and heroism simply shrivel on the vine

Then this shitty little poem about heartbreak

Has fulfilled its fuction as assigned