“A Poem”

"If he write you a sonnet he must really love you," she said out of nowhere.

Pencils, pastels, erasers and white pages were all scattered around us. Magazines, books and leaflets were laying in between us, opened, one on top of the other. And the hallway of the residential block was empty, if not for the two of us. The pavement was cold, even though warm spring rays of sun were caressing our faces. Outside the window the sky was clear. Soft, cotton-like clouds drifted lazily on its surface.

She giggled.

"But if he writes you a hundred sonnets he must really love sonnets."

You get easily impressed when you're young. Words stuck in your mind. They challenge you, bother you, shape you. And they all spin together, the past and the now, or, present.

I hated poets.

I hate poets.

In there, in between their words, I used to look for errors. Mistakes. Pompous feelings of self-centred... Narcissism. Up into my adulthood.

I thought:

"If you can write a poem about it, you're not feeling it enough."

Rhythms, rhymes, musicality and tempo.

Then, at some point in my twenties, I got drunk.

Really drunk.

And it was cold, even though it was a short and fulfilling summer.

And it rained before, but it was a dry kind of damp.

And, as I fell, I thought.

"If he writes you a sonnet he must have fall for you."

Oh, the ground was unpleasant. Yet, pleasant enough. A stimulus, or, maybe, a clash with reality. Rough, coarse, hard, and unexplainably comforting.

"But if he writes you a hundred..."

The clash against the ground was rough. Tough, maybe. It hurt and it stang and it bruised my skin.

Poets are miserable creatures. They're running aimlessly after a feeling they cannot express.

And when I grew up I figured it out.

Or, at least, I think I did.

"If he writes you a hundred sonnets," I whispered to myself. "The feelings he have cannot be easily explained."

And, of course...

Being...