TRULY I'D HAD IT WITH THOSE CRYPTIC ANGLO-SAXON BITCHES

always wrestling you into those Irish fisherman's sweaters with the pattern of the backwards lightning bolt over electrified sheep, so you could be recognized when drowned.

No more of those beds smelling of wet grass and the vanilla aftertaste of emotions past their expiration date in a stained cupboard. The constant expectation that I should abandon the polite cypher of my themed crossword, snap my beveled pencil and go out in the storm to stand on the hillside in the rain and swear at the heavens like Kierkegaard.

To rip apart books that displease me into Braille. To clomp to the cellar and build dangerous machines powered by dead pets and the spitting neon of Viking obscenities.

Ever have I failed to be covered in coarse hair and leave red footprints on the garden flagstones. Not once have I adjusted the intractable black electrons in a Camaro's xenobiotic underbelly, so it hummed again like an adverb in an avant-garde novel.

I cannot rely solely on the sharp planes of your face to read the geometric implications of my various failures and nerdy frailties. I will no longer pick up the dropped pearls of your bitter ellipses.

I'm going out dressed in the trivial motley of antique slang, and vanishing like a dead translation. I'm becoming the hyper-flexible cartoon you always feared.

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SOMEWHERE OUT THERE IS A LOVE POEM THAT IS A TRUE PLANET-KILLER

in bio-luminescent scrimshaw font, with booming line breaks that can be heard two miles away like a blue whale's heart or Fran Drescher's complaints.

But I am fine with the gnarled fact pattern of this little potato battery, whose argument is—like the Gordian jelly of the brain—nevertheless electrical.

44,000 years ago, such a tiny lozenge of light would have been all we needed to daub the first evidence of desire on the wall of a cave after eating some funky mushrooms and generally feeling that being a Neanderthal sucked.

Yet your amazement over the idea of this lit-up root tuber is more real to me than the massive ferns or tragic lack of alcoholic milkshakes in those interminable geological eras.

Because our days never feel like we're whisper-screaming at each other while trying to assemble cheap furniture in a dingy stone cottage at twilight next to a beach of rotting fish.

Because we both waited as teenagers in parking lots for something catastrophically exciting to happen, like a sea captain's widow on her walk.

Because you gently shut me down when I try to claim that my dark whimsy is a form of delight.

Because you love the practicality of a superhero with good boundaries, flat boots, and reasonably-sized breasts.

Because you are my rejection of haughty Joan of Arc milkmaid types with an unhealed, ultraviolet wound beneath a psychic breastplate that they never take off, even in bed.

Because you think someone should make a desert fantasia of George O'Keefe's life entitled Lawrence of Alabia.

Because you will argue to the death that the Guinness record for one-handed sorting of M&M's is not a field of endeavor, but a factory job.

Because I am your exorcism of sour, unemployed Troubadours with elvish hair, constantly dipping into their marsupial pouch of intoxicants and looking for sticky trivia to get angry about.

Because you suspect Batman just has Seasonal Affective Disorder from all those downcast, foggy gargoyles.

Because you bring me doctored tea the color of fresh pennies when I get sick, even though I become very Entish, with a lot of creaking, mossy overgrowths, breathy pauses, and eyebrow work.

Because you think singers in musicals often look like they're being electrocuted in slow motion.

Because you think that goatish hipsters chasing the tangerine dragon of their vapes do not compare to the discreet charm of the youth snorting Vivarin in the bathroom of the Jewish Community Center.

Because you are equally bored by the anti-lyric actuarial tables of those abstract poets whose work is the emotional equivalent of watching a trickle of water leak through a concrete retaining wall.

Because you want Werner Herzog to be retroactively teleported into Wuthering Heights so he can tell Cathy that the moors outside are savage and meaningless, like her pianoforte playing.

Because while comparison is the thief of joy, the larceny of these metaphors is anything but, and we are already criminals in the hooded, academic eyes of those allergic to intellectual pleasure.

Ergo, there's nothing for it to but to continue deliriously onward down this absurd, Latinate boulevard, as an inkwell burns like a black Molotov cocktail in my hand, and you raise the ragged red blazon of your heart high, lighting the way.

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"Truly I'd had it with those cryptic Anglo-Saxon bitches" arises out of my long-standing irascibility with gender expectations. For much of my life, it seems like the ancestral imperative has been to become some enraged brawler or gruff technician out of steam-punk myth, but I've always preferred the role of holy fool when it comes to romantic signification.

I wrote "Somewhere out there is a love poem that is a true planet-killer" in response to a request for a riff on Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You," and it arguably represents the first purely-exuberant love poem I've written in thirty years. (The rest have tended to be overshadowed by bleak humor, or trending toward—in the words of my undergrad fiction professor—"a dying fall.")