Challenge: Write a Valentine-themed poem

[29wordsforsnow]

Things seem a little slow around the PF&D lately, in part, I suspect, because we haven't had any challenges to prompt the old poetry muse to spark back into life. If it wasn't for laureate professor annaswirls stirring up the all of a sudden passion suddenly thread, the place would be as dead as a '57 Fairlane with a busted choke cable.

So hey. We've all (mostly) had a month off to watch football, fret about impeachment (USA), Brexit (UK), and insanely bad fires (Oz), or just eat leftover holiday cookies and play Words with Friends.

It's time for a new challenge, people.

Anyone else got that weird Groundhog-Day-feeling - except for the fires?

Anyway , bumpety bump.

P.S.: 'The Dead Don't Die' is really a horrible parody of groundhog day, dead people and the same old song reappearing...it kind of lost it's charme by introducing zombies. So please, Hollywood, write better scripts for Mr Murray.

 

[Levitating_Bed]

A (year and a) day late and a dollar short

I fell in love the day before Valentine's Day.

Working outside this time of year makes a hot chocolate seem like a very good idea. Luckily, there's a goddamned Starbucks, well, everywhere. She was young, probably not quite 20. No make up, ponytail, glasses. That whole 'I am at work and I do not care what you think' look. I love that look. She was working by herself and flashed bright eyes that matched her smile, as she asked me what I wanted.

I watched her make my cocoa. I'd had a long day, a bad day. And after a bad day I am wary of how easy it can be to pass a bad day along to someone else, and so I purposefully try to look for things that are good. While she pretty much met that criteria just by saying 'Hello', I fell in love with her while she made my cocoa. All business while she got it together and poured it, but then: she furrows her brow and concentrates on this obviously elaborate pattern that she is putting on top of the whipped cream with the caramel syrup. She does this like it is the most important thing in the world; occasionally pausing, and then starting again. It took forever. I had to hide a smile when I realized that if she gave head this way she might steal my soul in addition to the heart she'd whisked away with only "Hello." Our life together flashed by in that moment; a twenty years younger me meeting her, now; and then, us, sitting across the Scrabble board or the breakfast table, next to on the sofa or in theater seats, and then close, dancing slow in a dark room on a moonlit night in front of an open window with two empty glasses of wine on a table... She'd almost finished when another young employee walked up to the seating area which was around a corner, just out of sight.

He says 'Hey man, what's up? I was looking for you. Why you sitting over here all alone and anti-social?' I can't see the person he's talking to. Just as she puts the cover on my cup, destroying the caramel mandala that was, apparently, only for her, another voice says 'I wasn't alone.' That second, unseen speaker can't see her smile when he says those words, but it is an amazing smile: part blush, part hope, part lioness over a kill she's not going to share, and as I see it, I hear my own breath, quietly, audibly, catch. It then dawned on me that I had interrupted a quiet, barely there, conversation when I first walked up; I just hadn't realized it because at the time, I could only see one person. I hope he gets to see that smile someday too.

I sat in my car and stared at the half moon, drinking that cocoa slowly, letting it wash away what was left of my bad day. I sat and thought about the things I've already been lucky enough to have, and smiled to myself about the things I still want.

It will not contract
even in February -
desire's warm rush​

 

[todski28]

@levitating bed

That’s some smooth hot cocoa bitter sweet and full of longing.

A tale as old as time, but it didn’t run off into the hokey or cliche, cheers

 

[Rockymtnman]

If a heart is full it cannot break
If a heart is empty it cannot but break
Awake and alive a full heart
Shriveled and pitiful an empty heart
Mine is full because of you
It is unbearably, unbreakable