Valentine's Wishes and a Poem

May you have love that brightens your day like a bouquet of fresh flowers:

May you have love that sweetens your daily life:

May love be like a watering can that helps all sorts of healthy seeds to sprout in you:

May you be surrounded by things that you love, whether that be antiques:

or the joys of a romantic sideboard:

May you always remember:

And may you always have poems that celebrate love and literature!

Beds of Crimson Joy


She slips from her bed of crimson joy
early in the morning, creeping back to campus.
She leaves her lover sleeping in a downy nest
to keep this date with a different ecstasy.

Cracked open by cosmic mysteries,
she, too, sees creatures in the rosebuds,
faces of angels pressed against her window.
Is it divine revelation or simple fatigue?

Tempted by two mistresses, love and literature,
teased and tormented by both,
her sore lips sound out Shakespearean syllables;
her fingers tap out iambic pentameter.

She writes tortured poems, reads restlessly,
and waits for night’s return. Her tongue tingles,
her jaw aches, the sweetness of these days
must surely rot her teeth.

She finds the surest path to transcendence: a healthy dose
of Blake and the succor of skin,
great gulps of Whitman and whiffs of gasping grasps,
Christina Rossetti and the many types of fruited joy.