Unrequited Love

I have immense affection for poets, Those desperate lovers who often lose All vestiges of sanity in amorous pursuits. Propertius lived and wrote in Rome A few decades before the birth of Christ, He wrote passionately Of his tumultuous relationship with Cynthia, Cursing ships and seas when they took her away. And then there is the nine year old Dante Who sees the eight year old Beatrice And realizes there will never be A more beautiful seraphic girl; He will marry another woman For whom his father has promised him, But he will never mention his wife in a poem But will trust the prayers of Beatrice To keep him and Virgil safe Through the circles of Hell. Less than a hundred years after Dante, enter Petrarch: He sees Laura, a married woman, For the rest of his life there is nothing But love poems and tears; He writes endlessly of her blonde hair, Her piercing eyes, He is envious of the ground that touches her feet; The years achingly move forward and he only grows More obsessed with the unobtainable Laura. And there is my beloved Bob Dylan, As his marriage to Sarah falls apart He composes Blood On The Tracks And then becomes God’s lonely man Forever circling the globe on an endless tour Trying to escape being Tangled Up In Blue. When I’m alone lighting candles And burning incense, I fall into dreams about a tall girl, The most beautiful I’ve ever seen, But she’s entwined in arms that are not mine, And I can only find solace In the romantic and poetic defeats of the past.