Valentine’s Day Love Broken Heart

My last name is Love, it’s Valentine’s Day, love stinks, I’m a loser who won’t get lucky, Tom Petty is dead, Prince is dead, Dick Cheney is alive, Maroon 5 played the Super Bow, I don’t have a Valentine except my dead husky, I hate candy and flowers produced in the Third World by child slaves, Valentine’s Day is also Oregon’s birthday and some loveless hack in Salem will cut the beaver-decorated cake today wearing an untucked shirt, a cake that I should be cutting, and what will I do on this bogus holiday but build a driftwood fort in rain, and draw some jagged hearts in the sand, maybe carve a little sweet horny math into a cliff, and recall all my great Valentine’s Day open mics at school where we read poems and sang songs of broken hearts, and I once played in a rock and roll band called Matt Love and the Broken Hearts and we played one hot show and that was it, but one hot rock show in a lifetime is quite an achievement, and the company that made Sweethearts candies has gone bankrupt after something like a hundred years in business, and I used those candies for years as a teaching device, and often wrote well with my students on the prompts associated with those tasteless candies made from lard, corn syrup and cow hoofs, and really, if I look back, I received exactly one Valentine I can truly remember, in sixth grade, from a girl named Connie, who always wore a purple flowered dress, and the card featured two mummies holding hands, the wrapped hands sticking out from the upright coffins, and little hearts exploding from the clasp. Two dead people in love. That about sums it up for Valentine’s Day for me after all these many decades.