Do not fall in love with a poet If you are in love with a poet, remember this:

Alahna Sy they love so painstakingly hard with brutal

Do not fall in love with a poet;
they do not always mean what they say.
Their words are rabbit holes and you will be
falling for every single one of them
every goddamned time.
Do not fall in love with a poet;
they remember rhymes better than birth
dates
and memorize Rudy Francisco’s love poems
better than the weekly shopping list.
You will be out of milk
but she will still be full of poetry.
Do not fall in love with a poet
because when it’s all over,
she will leave bread crumbs from your
apartment door
to the subway station and when you get on
that train
there will be apple seeds on the railway track
up until the next platform and she will
tie threads on each of your bed posts
so she would know where to go when she’s
feeling
cold and utterly vulnerable.
It’s going to be exhausting but you have to
understand:
poets are just constantly afraid
to lose their way back home.
devotion
that they will lie awake every night
trying to piece together parts of you you don’t
understand
and when they do, they will make
haikus out of your skewed smile and
sonnets out of your twitchy nerves.
They will write, constantly, about you—
for you.
It’s going to be four in the morning and you’re
waiting for sleep
but all you’ll get is a really, really sloppy
misplaced kiss
from your lover,
writing in pitch-black darkness, on your skin,
with her mouth.
And in the morning when the light had
flooded the room
she will read you like a morning paper,
trailing a finger along the headlines on the
space below your neck
and the bylines on the outline of your lips.
You are the good news,
always.

Do not fall in love with a poet,

but you’re going to anyway
because we are all Alice, throwing ourselves
to every rabbit hole,
clinging helplessly to the sheer possibility
of finding something beautiful enough to
make ourselves believe
that every fall is worth it and every scraped
knee is worth remembering.
(We are all mad here.)