Romantic Love Poems

In The Asylum Dance, his work of singular liminal poetry, John Burnside lifts then quickly drops an element he all-but-calls the “weekender’s idea,” the outsider’s inaccurate map of the quayside or the skewed romance of tourist postcards that raises disdain, disgust & pity (equal measures) in locals looking on. The weekender’s idea, for Burnside, you happily project away from yourself, the local, onto the passing unsuspecting. It’s use is as much a tool of judgement (by locals of weekenders) than as one of actually adjudging perception; it’s as much a perceived perception. The weekender’s idea, in large, depends upon a cached cynicism of the actual real felt insiders’ existence of the place that the other is only able to glimpse from his (lack of) perspective and ultimately denies. That denial bringing the rise (nursed grudges, hurt, grumbles into late evening malts, glances, evil). This is Burnside at his most lovingly poetic, marshalling the stalled perceptions of the outsider (“S E R E N I T Y” emblazoned foot-high on his boat) against his authentic town-dwellers; as such a doggedly poetic image it hardly presents as a concept that’s useful as part of an “efficient interpretative strategy”.

II

When a relationship ends there comes a point when you're able to see through to the person behind the scrim of care and concession you erected. Love snuck over you and away and now you can hear her boring, you can feel your bones' creaky anxiety in her company, or choke on how simultaneously smug and aggressively humble she can be, and recoil in hurt as she drinks herself drunk then looks all dopey, hunched, horrific, the opposite of beauty, fiddling with her "guilty" cigarette, as if her lips are scared of it, the most inelegant of smokers. A mind turns in agony from thoughts it shouldn't think. Stories once hidden behind "our" back now creep out from behind hers, friends' unknown viciousness ribbons out from somewhere behind the dark. And each time you see her rehearsed robotism, her cold Kohl eyes, her cold SHARK eyes, you scream in a vocabulary of arson "I love you still but FUCK you, you FUCKING fuck!"

III

Paris was the most cramped hell when I visited last year. Lost in its locked streets, almost without language and hostage to a steadily whittling wallet, the most everyday of tasks became an ordeal akin to completely renegotiating the terms of my existence. The Metro, restaraunts, ‘do you have this in my size?’, basic human interactions - all permanents of routine at home in Scotland where the understood etiquettes of dialect, intonation, fashion &c. provide sure tickets to short-hand speed-read acceptance - all so many nightmares in that suffocating Paris. I began to deteriorate. Once-informed inner monologue, with all its tics of prejudice and aesthetic, its leanings and overbearing doubts, its ‘seen’ and ‘had’, ‘been’ and ‘went’ - all of it, it all became outer dialogue, everything negotiable and negotiating. The hard fast lines of my identity (the heuristic by which we all live lives) were blurring and fraying.