Just like last week, I’d like to introduce you to new talent. Libby Russell is a top 15 winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2019 and 2020. If this poem tells us anything, it’s that this girl is going places. She’s witty, smart and I just love her voice. I hope you do too!
Stop falling in love with people you could write poems about.
Stop tripping over and drowning yourself in metaphors
And obsessing over similes
Like your silly white shirt is clouding your judgement.
Resist those with whom you can be Radcliffian,
Fall in love with no one in any way Byronic,
Or those who may resemble, in any sense, the rose.
Do not fall in love with someone who could
Drive you down a highway at night and
Make it feel like you were flying, dizzy
On the vitality and the necessity and the kissing
And the kissing and the kissing.
Minimise the ways in which your love is Italian,
And ensure that it is in no way French.
Just be a bit British about the whole thing.
Avoid great passion – keep your head.
It cannot end in anything
Better than a rhyming couplet.
Fall in love with someone who is prose at best.
Somebody you could write an article about –
A conversational, informational blog,
Someone fit for the BBC homepage on a Sunday:
Sticking to the facts with just a touch of emotion.
Perhaps find someone with clammy palms
So you won’t mind letting go.
Someone who has kissing down to a fine art,
By which I mean, a neatly framed watercolour:
Firm pecks – you could call them sobering –
Lipless; polite, with just a touch of affection.
Don’t get used to kissing in Kandinsky colours –
Find someone you can go grey with.
Hurdle the white picket fence and tumble
Through the window of a semi-detached,
Onto the sofa next to the sensible choice –
Someone you could take home to your mother –
Someone you can sit with, woodenly,
With the cat, and a cup of tea,
And Songs of Praise providing the soundtrack
To your domestic tedium.
Calm down. Grow up. Come to terms
With the fact that love like that
Just isn’t for the likes of you.
It belongs to Other People, sealed away
Between the pages of an anthology,
(Think The Nation’s Favourite Love Poems)
Stowed secretly, adulterously, away in a nightstand.
Life will be sufficient, and you’ll get along just fine,
Because a tree grown in the dark can never miss the sun.
Consider settling for someone you could safely live without,
But please – stop falling in love with people you could write poems about.
Libby Russell
Alix in Wonderland 