Happy Valentine's Day

Slim Chants

The heart makes a fickle grave,

always letting ghosts crawl out.

The mind makes a flighty cage—

often fledgling hopes fall out.

The soul is a nest of fire,

time is a deepening spark.

The world is a net of wire,

love is a leap in the dark.

On Emily Dickinson's Birthday

This short verse is based on a fragment Emily Dickinson left in her notebooks

Love is like life, only longer—

Love is like death, only stronger—

Love is like Zion, only farther—

Love is like iron, only harder—

But prone to rust—

Love is the Holy Ghost telling dust—

Live, because you must.

Pink Slip

Saturday afternoon, at a pocket park in Chelsea, I waited for my last boyfriend. (OK, so he was also my first and so-far only one.) I’d agreed to meet for coffee, a year after dumping him.
At a nearby café table, a group of young men chatted. One of them wore pink hot pants, pink tiger-striped sneakers and his uncombed, harshly dyed hair knotted and held by a gold plastic comb. An orchid fell from his hairdo each time he turned to yell at his dog. “Don’t embarrass me,” he scolded. The meek bitch looked nervously up from under a thick, cheap pink bow tied over her ears. The ribbon looped twice around her head and fell in her eyes. I think she was a mix of boxer and pit bull. She also wore a pink leather collar and leash.
The man entertained his friends with stories. “I was dragging this stuffed dog around, tying it up outside shops . . ..”
The boxer crept quietly over to me.
My ex arrived and looked at me, then the dog. She looked back at him, and then hopefully at me.
“I have a dog now,” I told Marc. “She’s named Precious.”
He raised his eyes sideways to the sky with a plaintive look that said, “Since she lost me, she’s gone barking mad.”

Medical Alert

MEDICAL ALERT from Francine Prozac
Imagine a disease that afflicts nearly every single person on earth, with the possible exception of the hermit—
And absolutely no one is working on a cure!
Shocking?
Well, it’s sad but true.

Lovesickness strikes millions each year, especially this time of year. No one knows how it happens. Some say it’s the close quarters of dry, poorly ventilated rooms.

NO ONE IS IMMUNE!
Rich and poor, young and old, men and women—the malady can befall all. That hermit is probably hiding in the cave because he’s a severe case.
Look around, you’ll see the tell-tale symptoms of the afflicted: the twitching fingers of someone itching to check for messages that never come fast enough to assuage the pain, zombie women popping Good ‘n Plentys like self-prescribing addicts under cover of the dark movie theater, and hapless bodies scattered across the park lawn like victims of some secret weapon that blows out the brain but leaves the body behind.

FACT: An 89 year-old billionaire from Texas came down with the love sickness after a night in a pole-dancing bar, and in fourteen months, he was dead.

FACT: You might be the next victim.
(Don’t laugh—that’s one way the disease is thought to be passed from person to person.)

Many try home remedies: cold showers, garlic, writing poems. Guess what? They don’t help much.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Help support my campaign to find a cure. Cash, checks and chocolates are welcome. Every little bit of chocolate helps.

Atonement

In the film, Atonement, the costumes and sets remind one how much was lost in the war, and how much the English sacrificed to win.
I loved how water divides and united the characters. The lovers Cecilia and Robbie die in different tunnels—the soldier stands at the shore he thinks divides him from his love, but she is floating in the same water, when the London tunnel she’s come to as a bomb shelter floods.
As a young girl, Briony wants to know that Robbie will save her from drowning. Later, she wishes she could save him or her sister. Briony atones by making them live on in her head.
Robbie saves Briony from drowning, then yells at her. He rescues the twins lost at night in the wild and is arrested on his return for child abuse, because of Briony’s confused accusation. Robbie makes mistakes, too: his passion for Briony’s sister causes her to break the vase, and he mails the obscene letter, wrongly choosing to entrust it to the child Briony.
The one act of lovemaking in the book also breaks things—Briony’s faith and the barriers between class. Is love selfish and violent? In youth, yes, but the war is a purifying fire. Perhaps Cecilia should have tested Robbie, to see if he could save her. But no one can save loved ones in the war; one can only try to save anyone one comes upon. The scene of the sisters in the hospital is echoed in the slaughtered girls that Robbie stumbles upon. The characters put aside selfish desire and devote themselves to selfless service.