Not a bleedin’ valentine

Current mood: Posing as a not-so-romantic poet
Current music: ‘Blood Money’ by Luke Pickett

The way things are shaping up, it doesn’t look like I’m able to get out more than, oh, about one blog entry a year. I’m sorry guys, but life just kinda gets in the way. (However, before you get any ideas, I’d state quite positively that death would be an even greater deterrent to blogging.) It’s a curious thing, but if one has a busy life one hasn’t much time to write about it; and conversely, if one has a dull and uneventful life, one has nothing to write about.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, I thought I should treat all you lost souls and bleeding hearts out there to a brand-spanking-new poem I wrote on love. This is not, under any circumstances, to be mistaken for a ‘love poem’. Read on, and you shall see...

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SO TELL ME, JUST WHAT THE HELL IS ‘LOVE’, ANYWAY?

Not a bleedin’ valentine; but rather, a sort of multi-layered poetic sandwich

(2010)

By Aureala

So tell me,
Just what the hell is ‘love’, anyway?
What does this terrible four-letter word mean?
There must be a million –
No, make that a billion –
Cheesy love poems out there; and from what I’ve seen,
Few are at all accurate in what they say,
And not one clinches it for me.

That’s why I’m sitting here,
Trying to work it out for myself.
It’s all very well, growing up on some fairy-tale ideal;
But then you step out and find a real dragon or pirate or demon,
And you realise that all the brave warriors and knights and seamen
Are actually silver-tongued salesmen spouting advertising spiel.
You turn them down, of course, but then you worry about being left on the shelf
Which, anthropologists will probably declare, is a pretty ancient fear.*

Seeing as there’s no ready-made Prince Charming,
How is a girl supposed to choose?
‘Follow your heart!’ urge a billion amateur poets,
Trying to drown me in their sea of cliché.
Follow some blood-pumping muscular body part? I’ll decline, if I may –
I reject this view that girls possess no wits.
Without great thought and care, there is much one might lose;
If you consider the stakes, it’s positively alarming.

The trouble with trusting your feelings is, how can you tell
The difference between love and obsession, obsession, obsession?
The heart, instead of being a beacon of truth, grows tight and flutters weakly instead,
While below it, the guts twist like snakes, writhing around.
Then the same battered old train of thought begins to pound,
Running berserk in wild circles (the driver’s dribbling drivel and there’s been a massive signal failure) inside your head,
And you feel as though you’re being whacked repeatedly by a wicked little imp with a wickedly large hammer in its possession,
Who’s trying to turn your life into a first-class private hell.

You can’t seriously expect me to believe that that’s love?
’Cause if it is, love is a highly over-rated emotion;
But that’s just how it seems to hit me every time.
Worse still, love is highly irrational!
Even if you think that of all human beings you are the most rational,
On closer inspection you’ll find that any rationalising you do on love is done after the fact, not before, and therefore you are clearly sans reason, sans rhyme.
There is nothing but some primal urge that’s causing your blind devotion,
And you can’t purposely change how you feel, when push comes to shove.

Even now, those billion poets must think me thoroughly cynical;
I can almost see the contempt in their eyes, hear their disdainful denunciation.
But surely it isn’t only me who gets rattled
By the kind of love that crashes around your system like an irate rhinoceros?
To feel nothing at all, and then to be suddenly wracked by torment, is surely rather monstrous?
There must be someone who, when struck by Fat Boy’s arrow, doesn’t get so embattled;
Who assumes a serene guise, and loves in moderation,
And isn’t drenched in angst over matters merely physical.

To be honest, I find the thought of such a complete lack of passion rather a bore;
Yet passion without any deeper meaning is, frankly, even more boring.
Maybe it’s a fact that only a few can see:
That you’d need less than a requisite number of brain cells to find sex without love at all gratifying
(Well, unless you’re that kind of bloke). For my part, I reckon intellectual stimulation is far more satisfying,
As is good conversation. But to hear couples bicker, perhaps marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,
And perhaps all that truly matters in a partner is whether or not he’s heavily snoring.
These days, no one appears to believe in soul mates any more.

It’s not that I don’t feel – still waters run deeper than I can say –
It’s just that I think, too, as I hope you’ll agree.
Unfortunately, I still get besieged by charging rhinos and train wrecks and winged babies with a cruel flair.
Thus, in defiance of those billion banal poets, I won’t be writing any bleedin’ valentines,
At least not the sort that start with the old ‘Roses are red / Violets are blue’ lines.
For all my ranting and rambling, it’s apparent I haven’t really gotten anywhere;
So tell me,
Just what the hell is ‘love’, anyway?

* Possibly dating as far back as the invention of the shelf.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, folks! Feel free to run out and buy your heart-shaped boxes of chocolates now (and eat them yourself)...