I have taken a good, long while off from this blog while I poured my time and energy into the new memoir, Love & Fury. Yesterday, Valentine's Day, I found myself tinkering with this poem:

AGAINST COOL

When you pretend you’re not but know you are,

you suffer worse than if you just confess you are in love.

The rain falls right through your umbrella and the sun

and moon deny the whole cold day and night they are in love.

All winter blinding white flakes rise up into the sky.

You start to think the shutters and the windows are in love.

The wheel and the road, the wrench and the bolt,

made for each other, hurt, but they are not in love.

That sometimes she frightens you with her clarity

or angers you with her reserve are proof you are in love.

It’s one thing to dissemble in the fiercest heat of ardor

but better to play dead than pretend you are not in love.

Underground, earth and ice, igneous rock and lava

long ago accepted that the past and future are in love.

Play spout to the water, act a chimney to the smoke

and admit once and for all to everyone you are in love.

Come on, Richard, what’s so hard for you to understand?
That yours is the kind of misery men feel when they're in love?