Love Poets, My Condolences

Ladies and gentlemen, gather round.

We are here to perform the last rites

of every “rose is red, moon in June” tragedy

promptly posing as poetry.

Love poets, my condolences.

Not for your heartbreaks, 

those are predictable. 

But for your imagination,

which clearly died before tasting puberty.

Every time you rhyme fire with desire,

Shakespeare fakes a sneeze to hide a seizure.

Every time you compare hair to the misbehaved waves of oceans,

a fish dies choking on a plastic straw.

You say her lips are cherries.

That is not love, son

that is fruit salad.

You say her skin is silk.

That is not semantics, son

that is caterpillars on vacation.

You say her voice is honey.

That is not aesthetic, son

that is bee vomit,

cooked in your audacious desperation

to cure a hard-on.

Your metaphors

aren’t metaphors.

They’re malpractice.

Your poetry is not love.

It’s acid reflux.

It’s verbal dysentery.

It drips clichés

like bad plumbing in a cheap inn, 

and you expect applause?

You dress up lust like it’s eternal.

You confuse dopamine with destiny.

You sell orgasms in rhyme and meter

and dare to call it “immortal verse.”

Love is not candles and violins.

It’s arguments over what to watch.

It’s shared scars

from baked-in trauma.

It’s one of you hogging the blanket,

and the other silently plotting murder.

It’s losing teeth and hair,

stacking inches and wrinkles

over sloppy seductions

and imperfect intercourses.

But you don’t write that.

Because honesty doesn’t sell greeting cards.

So you recycle metaphors

like a broken grinder, 

louder, dumber, blander.

And your bribed audiences applaud you

for writing the same poem

your ancestors wrote to each other,

just with a prettier pen and shinier ink.

You are not poets.

You are necrophiliacs.

You keep fucking the same dead metaphors,

expecting them to moan differently.

I am not your critic.

I am your death sentence.

And this?

This is your funeral pyre.

Let your rhymes burn.

Let your metaphors scatter.

Let your “forever loves”

dissolve like incense.

And when the ashes settle, 

let the records state the simple truth:

Love will survive you.

It always does.

But poetry,

poetry will not forgive you.

It will hunt every stanza you touch,

spit your clichés back into your throat,

and carve on your gravestone:

“Here lies another love poet.

Un-fucked and un-given-a-fuck-about.”