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-is that you have to keep a person's attention.
No one cares that you just fell in love.  It's
obvious, the way he holds you like a crane,
sticks his face into you as if you were a nest.  

I don't mind, but I don't care to read about it.  
Love poems are difficult, they make people
jealous or afraid.  Here's something that will

get their attention in a poem: playing
horseshoes last July, your  mother having a
miscarriage in the bathroom, your father
pulling a curl out of his eyeball, remarking on
the Jenna Jameson controversy.  But even

that seems like I am trying to make my life
more interesting than it really is.  The thing
about poetry is that it is almost impossible
to write about eating potato chips on the
sofa and feeling happy and make it beautiful

enough.  Being happy is never beautiful
enough, we want to cry.  Here's something
that will make me never forget you: the
Christmas lights making weird colors in the
snow, your boyfriend beating the shit out of
your face, and you, thinking all of this is not

important.  You go home, schedule an
irrelevant surgery for something fun like
breasts or claws.  You write a poem about

sitting there and how sitting there is not
important.  I like the way you think, is what
I would say to you if I could.  The way you
bend metaphor backwards as if it is an angry

body coming at you too fast.  The way you
have of ignoring what happened tonight in
favor of your mittens, written into a poem
so that the person reading it knows you
are angry, but not about what.

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