Love poetry, or Trying to Turn Shit into Chocolate Cake

You can write love poems—even good ones—for specific women as long as you don’t expect the words to work. Because they don’t.

I have a friend who already has self-published one small book of love poems. The cover looks cool, it looks like a real book, but the poems within are the opposite of good: riddled with clichés and trite expressions like dead bats hung on a clothesline of pretension.

Worst of all, they beg.

A wise woman already knows a man who confesses to love her is completely vulnerable, no matter how tough he acts. Supplicating makes a man seem weak. Really, if you want to do well with women, remember they are Klingons at heart. The few that have hearts, ha ha.

Sad to say the woman my poor friend Can’t Live Without™ whom he’s known for years, is an Asshole, a sanctimonious, “spiritual” cruella who hates him for some reason he’s never quite explained. Judging from the fury of her words, you’d think he raped her and left her for dead; I think he deceived her about something, but nothing close to cheating on her.

I’d offered to edit his first manu, but halfway through he up and self-published it, full of spelling errors and all.

I suicidally offered to edit the 2nd one and heard nothing more about it. Then out of nowhere, last week he asked if I’d looked at it. When I told him I never got the file he flipped, then sent it.

Now I’ve flipped.

Love Manuscript #2, aka More of the Same, almost 140 pages of short-yet-hard-to-stomach poems. I don’t even envy the prodigious output, it’s all terrible.  I’m trying like hell to make his stuff work, but secretly I hope he ignores my editing. I love my friend and hate his needless suffering, and not because I have to suffer his poopoetry. If I could magically erase the cruella’s horrible personality and reprogram her or create a magical fuckbot in her image, I would. I’ve already dared tell him in a 500-words-or-less essay why I think this woman is a disaster, that even if she saned-up he still has no future with her and should be glad for it. But he can’t listen to reason any more than his poems can un-suck: the poor SOB is in love.

Some people are just fucking machochists, I guess. Like me, trying to turn shit into chocolate cake.

(If you ever find this blog, my friend, you’ll have to forgive me. You’ve suffered enough).

Pot, pancakes, despair

Last night (ah, the horrors that follow those words) I reached for marijuana, just a few hits off a joint cig (stuff called “Ultra II” if that means anything) the first time I’ve touched any plants since Xmas.

Pain was (and is) eating me alive, but since that’s going to happen anyway, why not file a few teeth out of the shark’s mouth?

It worked, sort of.  I took 4 small hits.  The shit worked as promised and I waited another hour before driving.  I went to my friend Egg’s house, where he prepared homemade French bread pizzas with fresh garlic  (complimenting the half a giant candy bar I wolfed down on the way over).

Egg is up on my complaints with women.  I explained the latest delusions I was using to keep my spirits propped up.  Women are founts of life and primordial swamps of misery.  You can’t hate what you love, the rose has to be planted in manure, etc.  Egg knew all this already, his hard-working wife fully provided him CliffsNotes on the subject of female capriciousness by forever going out with fags while not fucking him as much as he would like.

While Egg left to take his drunkard older brother home, I stayed with his two young sons, the 5-year-old and me ending up watching Born on the 4th of July.  I hate Oliver Stone but don’t deny his genius, his movie worlds have their own laws of physics, morality and are beautiful to watch.

Of course, we couldn’t watch long because of the horrific nature of the film and fortunately the kid lost interest.  When Ron Kovic was lying down screaming (which as Tom Cruise as he did a lot) I told the kid “the guy was having a nightmare he was being burned with a giant popsicle”.  Maybe it was the truth.

I went from my computer to Egg’s computer and the internet was just as I’d left it at my place.  The rambunctious kid kept playfully attacking me, trying to jump on my lap.  Normally I hate children but as an honorary uncle I wrestled him a little.  It helped remove some of the despair from the air.  Despite the urchin’s cherubic looks someday he too will be going through the same hell I am now, that all men suffer, gay or straight, rich or poor.  Who knows what her name will be or even if she’s born yet.

It finally got late.  Egg returned, his wife came back from partying with the finooks and he and I went to Wal-mart and ate breakfast at an all-night chain (not ihop).

I’m going to fucking die and I’m sorry it wasn’t last night in my sleep, those pancakes were good.