My mother recently had a conversation with someone I can’t stand; an old hometown person who rankled me back when I lived on the Island and has continued (via emails that appear out of the blue every few years) to irritate me through my 20s.

“He’s writing a lot of poetry these days,” my mother said, after I’d gone off on a massive tirade about how much this person still gets under my skin. I couldn’t help myself: sometimes people just really irk me, and even the thought of my mother talking to them is enough to make my blood boil. This reaction is unnecessary, and my mother got irritated with it. “He seemed like a very romantic character,” she told me, in an effort to get me to shut the hell up.

Leave it to my mother to find the compassionate angle. She’s right, of course. Now that I think about it, this aggravating character is an absolute romantic, and that’s always what’s bugged me about him.

For all their sensitivity and rose-sniffing, every romantic has a black shadow. You see, the dark side of a romantic is the desire to find the gravity and fatalistic potential in everything. Every glance is a star-crossed exchange, each cough the first step towards the inevitable, deep chasm of death that waits patiently for each of our souls, every cloud in the sky a stenciled soft message from the heavens about love or fate or the future.

Simply put, my problem with this person can be boiled down to the fact that he is a poet, and I write non-fiction. Our worldviews are shaped by our wordviews, and I like the slightly embellished narrative non-fiction while it seems he’s found a home in poetry (12 books he’s filled up, my mother relays. I picture spiral bound notebooks with roses ballpointed on the covers, which is awful and heartless of me. If God is a poet, I am clearly hanging out with Christopher Hitchens in the pits of nonfiction writer hell.)

If my mother’s description is appropriate (and, putting aside my own issues with this person, I think it is), the truth about me is revealed: I hate romantics. I’m a little too earthy and grounded for my own good, sometimes. I get short tempered and pissy with people who have their heads in the clouds. I want follow-through, damnit. I demand perspective! I won’t tolerate well-intentioned blabber-facing.

This is a side of myself that I’m not especially in touch with…but the presence of which I cannot deny. I am a pragmatist. I am a realist. And romantic poets irk me in ways I can’t fully quantify.

Caveat: why then does my father’s poetry not bother me? I must think on this further.