Valentine’s Day Poem

O it is St Valentine’s Day again
& I have been here oft’, the breakfast

table strewn with egg-shell & not a single
message, for which, thank you.

Where is all that Guido Cavalcanti stuff
about slain hearts & so forth?

Here’s mine. You can give it away
to, say, anyone…. Isn’t it crazy

that here I sit with all this
unkempt passion & my hair

brushed? No, we did not wake up
together & book lunch at Sardo’s

with a shiny aperitif, laughing because
in your neck of the woods

the verb ‘to love’, amare,
happens also to mean ‘bitter’.



La Hollandaise
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