No one writes love poems anymore.
I mean, tonight I’m texting you emoticons while I drive frantically from one job to another.
I’m not chewing thoughtfully on a quill, my inkstained fingers scratching out, rewriting, perfecting couplets by lamplight.
Although life these past few years has seemed somewhat akin to huddling in a cold garrett above a tannery, or some other cliche of Victorian deprivation, it has not been the kind of deprivation that cultivates an atmosphere of literary appreciation. We would all rather bear witness to the parade of hangings and suicides and dancing bears papering our flatscreens than chance a look at the divine.
But tonight…
Tonight, from somewhere in the middle of my chest, there is a longing. A longing for a new sonnet, something descendant from the grand traditions, a thirst for poetry that does it all, that hits me where it hurts, gets all real and brassy and suddenlike but still carries beauty. Some scant lines would do, just a few, from a new poet, a right-now poet who means it, who has ripped off the cravat and monocle and stands in the ditch, digging, getting dirty, looking for the bottom so that we can say, “Finally, here we are, here is the bottom. Look up.”
Someone who signals that we can at last begin the ascent back to where we belong, which is in each other’s arms and of them, which is doing respectable work fearlessly, which is a state of bliss that transcends electrons and minimum wage and data transfer rates and leaves us giddy and disbelieving at the luck we share.