Future Pens

I lie awake in the dullest bed of our time

Outside you are making the myths and legends

For great poets and historians to document

So as you, my lover, are remembered forever

You walk the back streets in fine handmade suits

Beating, fighting, maybe killing

Those who won’t be missed

For the coins in their pockets

And leaving poems ripped from books you have stolen

In the bands of their hats or tucked in their belts

You leave Byron, Shelly, Homer and Keats

Never Wordsworth, you say he has not the substance

To be left atop a corpse

You steal the books of poetry for me

From great houses along elm lined lanes

All leather bound, finely printed on magnificent paper

And at dawn you enter, what you call, the dullest room of our time

And we make the love that keeps our hearts beating

And the neighbors complaining through the walls to morning

When you sleep

I study your face for new signs of aging

I dread the day I see you in a hospital bed

An asylum, yelling poetry, stabbing yourself with blunt fingernails

A beautiful swansong for a dying era

The final chapter for our love

Nay your life

In the books and poems written by the future pens