recycled stories.

I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day.
I won’t be peer-pressured
by society to give my loved one
chocolate, roses & diamonds.
I want to celebrate
Love Day—any day, really, where
the urges to express
my happiness & appreciation
for my wife, Trin, gushes up
like a lava flow, a geyser stream.
My love can’t be contained, a solitary
confinement, to one lonesome day in February.

This was my Patrick Henry declaration,
my campaign pledge, for Love Day.

Part 2.

Love Day’s a toddler now, 3 or 4 yrs old.
No longer wobbly & unsure.

Usually I get Trin some
vintage jewelry from Attenson’s—
hibernated cicada pins, lovebird earrings,
sad, Elvis-ish hound-dog buttons, etc.
Plus, I’ll normally throw in
a couple Romance Story comics.
You know the kind.
Lichtenstein lifted the covers for Modern Art:
some worried, fly-eyed blond,
tears melting icicles, lamenting on her bed—
thought-bubble mushroom-clouding
anxieties—“How could he fall
for that other woman? I wish I was dead!”

Part 3.

I already have a few items on hold at Attenson’s—
a silhouetted, Siamese cat pin,
a crazed, Groucho, Scottie dog button—
because this year Love Day will arrive
a week before Valentine’s Day.

You see, Amazing Gary—
Coventry’s Copperfield ruffian—
is taking his old men from
Menorah Park (he’s
a volunteer coordinator there)
to a Monster Truck Rally on the 14th.

I’m helping him out,
so I get a donated ticket.

We’ll be among thousands of men
watching Gravedigger & Bigfoot
trample abandoned clunkers
like ants at a picnic.

Maybe the giant T-Rex robot
will be there—ripping cars in half (like
Neanderthal Oldsmobile love letters),
spitting fire upon them,

coating us in exhaust fumes
& twists of smoke.