The staff here at I Thought Of Another Excuse To Kiss You has been wracking its collective brain for something nice to say on St. Valentine’s Day, since we are after all such experts on excuses for romantic behavior. As you can see, we completely missed our deadline, a thing which can be blamed on several factors, not least of which is a certain distaste for notions of love that involve obligations, as well as a certain degree of crabbiness over the fact that no one was expecting anything whatsoever from us. In desperation we turned to our poetry editor, who is always falling in love with someone or feeling mopey about someone he used to be in love with, and who, to be perfectly honest has been persona non grata around the office for several months now. After several hours of cajoling and numerous assurances that, no, he was not a “major bring-down”, he wrote this last night. If it seems, well, a bit desultory, we will point out that it was accompanied by a 15 page essay (sadly, it was accidentally deleted by one of our interns) on tone poems, the use of the concrete in poetry, and how the actual experiences of the poet are “merely the brushes with which the crushed distillates of pure emotiveness are applied to the canvas of the soul”, and how we wouldn’t understand what he meant anyway.

what all came once
at once, instant as a glance
now I assemble from
the looks I almost catch
in eyes like this

distant creatures dark in sorrows
and the difficult lengths where time stood ranked
and you learned how to move that wrist
and lay it in, your sheaves of night
chords and chords deep

(we on the staff at the brendagenda would like to point out (just for the record) that the staff at itoartky had a major oversight on vday05. to our knowledge there was at least one person who was blue as a result of a itoartky talk and hug deficit on pinkandred day. at least one, that we know of.)

(We on the staff at obey scient would like to note that the modern concept of Valentine’s Day is a corporate invention for the benefit of the floral, greeting card, candy, and restaurant industries. If ever there is a single day on which romance becomes obligatory, not offered, when tender affection for one’s beloved signifies more than on any other day of the year, then those things are dead.)