Romantic figures stalk the desolate streets
whose actual lives are scarcely that romantic.
How can they be? No life is that ideal!
(Reality must catch up at long last).
Leave dreams to adolescents and their ilk:
romanticism is a bitter fruit
whose peel is more enticing than its pith
can ever prove, it’s such a devious poison.
Affect the classic pose. It’s not quite prose
perhaps… But it is poetry. Mere childhood’s
adventurousness madly lies behind it
just like a dream wrapped in a sacrament…
While, in the foreground, all is calm and ordered
and discipline’s the flavor of the day.
Featured in New Lyre Summer 2023
The New Lyre 
The great Romantics weren’t jolly campers who went around sugercoating things. It sounds as if the poet is tarring Romanticism with an overbroad brush.
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