Never Shag A Poet

Sitting at my table I’m a face in the crowd

As I listen to the words that are read;

The stories and the laughs and the horrors that I hear

Reveal brief but clear glimpse inside your head.

Loss it would seem is a theme that recurs

As each poet lets their story unfold;

In all of it’s guises, it’s many shapes and sizes,

Events are now painfully retold.

Death is the rarest in it’s final goodbye

As you struggle as the one who is left;

But at least deep inside where the memories reside

You have light when you’re feeling bereft.

You know in your heart that is wasn’t ever choice

That they always held you close till the end;

They still wanted the place that they held in your heart:

Husband, parent, sibling, child or friend.

More common it would seem if we go with the theme

Is the lover who betrays our trust;

And to vent our ire in a rant full of spleen

Gives cathartic release and is a must!

Bastards they are that they chose someone else

And have ruined our ability to tell;

The real from the fake, second-guess the choice we make,

May their faithless souls all rot in hell.

Next comes the quiet slow silent death

Of a relationship that’s stifled by time;

Years creeping by like a slowly rolling fog,

Boredom stifling your essence like a vine.

But worse yet than this is the marriage not in bliss

Where the partners are so clearly mismatched;

As they bicker and they pick, heart and soul feeling sick

And they strive to paper over all the cracks.

What will be the end or the final breaking point

As they struggle to subsume themselves for now?

In the final deathlike throe of the relationship they know

They must end their current torture but just how?

Having heard these stories play and empathised this way

I see the verse now taking on life of it’s own;

All the passion and the pain, light and darkness of a stain

As it seeps into life formed as a poem.

A thought now to ponder as you view this slice of life,

Should you really shag a poet do you think?

Do you want at some point all your foibles and your faults,

To be immortalised forever now in ink.

A further thought to ponder as you listen to these tales;

Which are graphically told just as they are;

You may find yourself the subject and are now poetic fodder,

And are featuring as main and central star.

So finally to conclude, if you decide to chance as said

And you venture into waters still and deep;

If you do go shag a poet, and you take that chance and blow it,

Remember what you sow you well may reap.