Wednesday 4 February 2015

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

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