On the Boy in the Poetry

Honest thoughts on the inevitable question that accompanies love poems.

On the Boy in the Poetry

Who’s the boy in the poetry?

The question is inevitable. I write any poetry dealing with matters of the heart and a boy with kind eyes and a beautiful mind and the question is always asked.

Who’s the boy in the poetry?

My friend asks because she thinks that I fancy the boy in our history class. (I do. But she doesn’t need to know that.) My mother asks because poetry about a boy would mean that I’m finally showing some true, undeflected emotion. My English teacher asks as a teasing query to break the ice as I wait for her critique on the order in which I strung the words together.

Who’s the boy in the poetry?

I expertly deflect the question because nobody would believe my answer. The genuine truth is that I don’t know the boy in the poetry. I often wonder if I’ve met him and didn’t know it, or maybe I’ve never met him, or perhaps the truth is the most terrifying version of reality: he doesn’t exist at all.

In retrospect, there’s a fourth possibility: the boy I’ve been writing about all these years is scattered across this planet like the ashes of everything we could have been.

The kind eyed boy lives in London. He’s in a band and listens to old records and alt rock and all he wants is to be somebody someday. All he wants is to break the mold of what he was born into, he does not want to overcome his stereotypes, he only wants to break them.

The boy with the floppy hair lives in Chicago. He is clean-cut with a 3.9 GPA and wears his varsity jacket like a second skin no matter the heat. He is most people’s definition of perfection, of #goals, but he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t want “perfection.”

The walk that could make agnostics certain of their belief belongs to a boy who dances down the streets of New York City. He dreams of trading the torn up pavement beneath his feet for the manicured stage of a Broadway theatre.

The boy with a wit that knocks me off my feet lives in Paris. He writes in a stained journal sitting at a sidewalk café with an overpriced latte. He rests his chin on his windowsill and stares at the Eiffel Tower, hoping for another poem to reveal itself, for his muse to speak.

The boy in my poetry lives all over the world, different pieces of him living in everyone. So, who is to say that the poetry isn’t about some part of you? Who is to say that the expressive face isn’t yours, that the beautiful mind does not reside in your skull?

Now go. Dance down the streets, pour your soul into your sonnets, leave everything on the football field, pull your emotions out of your chest and use them as ink to draw with.

Whatever you do, however you do it, do it with grace and power. Live up to the poetry.

-- A.C.// 11:34 PM: Sometimes poetry is all we have to live up to.

Author's Note

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