I grew up in novellas and thick tomes,
Seeing sunlight filtered through dust particles dancing in the air,
Springing from the pages that held my very essence.
I was well-traveled through countries and eras
Through countryside with wildflower-air
And the musty scents of a busy city,
Accustomed to all sorts of gentlemen and ladies.
I don’t consider myself a romantic;
Fancy of whims belongs to ink and paper,
And I am much too grown up for such trivial things as love.
It was never something solid,
Never tangible unless I held the book containing it in my hands.
Love was just a pretty word used by desperate people.
But I thought of love then
As I pressed carnation petals between the pages of a Jane Austin book,
Or hid roses in the folds of Oscar Wilde.
I dreamt of love as I read of things I’d never truly understood,
Like an actor reading lines of Shakespeare without comprehension,
Love fell short of its mark.
I don’t consider myself a romantic
I consider myself tragic,
A quality which spills like an over full cup of tea,
Staining itself onto the pages of my books.
I speak of myself through poetry and prose,
But never in a way that can candidly be made sense of.
My love has never been a person,
But personified in the ideas I fill my pretty head with,
Making ladies swoon and gentlemen shake with passionate fury.
My love is in my elegance,
My eloquence,
And my erudition,
Of which I owe all to the words of dead poets.
Being tragic I prefer being woefully misunderstood,
Kept as mysterious as the death of Edgar Poe
And maintaining an air of troubled youth.
the Honest Poet 