A Lover’s Poem by Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift loves her fans (“The Swifties”), cats (she has three, and is starring in the woefully talked-about upcoming film, Cats: The Musical), and apparently, now, the English. The perpetually sunny Sagittarius who crushed the VMAs in a technicolor suit fit for a House Muva (yes, she’s an ally), has been spending her August reaping the rewards of her newly-released album Lover, which is both pleasing the fans and winning over the skeptical with its mix of heartache and bounce-in-the-car pop beats. Last Monday’s VMA awards marked the 10-year anniversary of “imma let you finish,” making us realize that we have been living over a decade in T. Swift’s world, in which time she’s sold over 50 million albums, won 10 Grammy awards, and recieved a “Big Help” Kids Choice Award from none other than Michelle Obama.

The singer-songwriter is also a poet published by British Vogue in 2017. Leave it of course, to the English. (Sample line, from “The Trick to Holding On”: The only thing cut and dry/ In this hedge-maze life/ Is the fact that their words will cut but your tears will dry). All of this on top of Swift’s newfound devotion to the Mother Country (and all its lads) makes it is only necessary to make time to flirt with the canon of English poetry. We found it only fitting to pay a poetic tribute to Swift by creating a composition of love and longing out of erasure and assemblage from the lyrics of Lover. Behold:

———

Holy orange bottles, I pray to you
I pray to Jesus too (the altar is my hips)
Chandelier’s still flickering here.

I’ve loved you three summers now
You refused to settle down.
Can you just not step on our gowns?

If I was a man,
Barefoot in the kitchen in a 20-year dark night,
(everyone looked worse in the light)
Eeh-eeh-eeh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh
(I enjoy walking Camden Market in the afternoon.)

So sad it isn’t love (It’s free rent.)
American glory faded before me
ripped up my prom dress

Can I go where you go?
Go there every night
Never walk Cornelia Street again;
You’ll never find another
Man, to be my lover