Romanticism: A Definition

Romanticism:

/rOm-an-tis(e)s-ism/

1. Jazz, slow & melodious, it's the saxophone player I passed in the rain,
when I went walking down Riverfront Park
& was swallowed whole by the great aching absence of you.

2. It's the volume of sonnets thumbed smooth by all the fools that found solace there.
it's all the flowers that had to die, in all the vases in all the world,
& the moist eyes who made metaphors out of their dried fragrant bodies.
It's the inconsequential things we made beautiful when we spun tedium into galaxies
and made the detritus of books in our beds
look like love songs to some awkward god, with ink & time on his hands.

3. We are not roses all of the time, nor should we be.
sometimes we are human merely, breathing merely, alive merely
& to be loved merely is all we could ask for when we are little more than a yawn or grunt,
to collapse in a heap of flesh & blood, of roses & sonnets
& be loved, merely.