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).