Some like being bound up in leather and chains,
Others spanked with a branch from a tree,
But the people who truly get turned on by pain
Try to publish their love poetry.

The poet’s not known for his psychical health:
He wrestles despair, feels dejected,
Not that undisposed to killing himself,
Yet his heart’s work so often rejected.

Sometimes he must wait the best part of a year,
Like an innocent man on death row,
To have to him confirmed his most terrible fear,
For they are quite sadistically slow.

And the hurt they inflict? It’s not over yet.
Do they find wounding fragile souls funny?
Some journals won’t read the submissions they get
If the poets don’t first send them money!

Once it’s crafted and honed and as good as Ted Hughes,
On a par with their earlier choices,
They find a new method to mentally abuse:
They prioritize “marginalised voices.”

The agony felt by a hounded young deer
As he’s brought to the ground by a predator
Is as nothing compared to the suffering and fear
That’s induced in a poet by an editor.

*****

Lucius Falkland writes: ‘I wrote this poem in response to having so many of my love poems rejected by poetry journals. It struck me as absurd that poets experience feelings, including being in love, so intensely that they must process them via poetry, they share the most poignant aspects of their lives with journal editors, and yet they know they will frequently get rejected. It is as though they write about their deepest pain only to then subject themselves to the further pain of being told that they can’t even express their pain properly. ‘Are we poets Masochists?’ I wondered. Naturally, this poem was itself rejected by a number of editors – with one even commenting that he was sympathetic to my plight. before rejecting it anyway because ‘it’s not the right fit’ (euphemism for ‘I don’t like it!) – before being published in The New English Review.”  

Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of a writer and academic originally from London. His first poetry volume, The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre, was published in 2025 with Exeter House Publishing. It can be purchased here.

Illustration: “Vinegar Valentine – 05” by BioKnowlogy is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.