Apologia for Love Poems I Have Written

by David Thornbrugh

Love poems I have written return, tails between their legs, covered with cigarette burns and complaining of corrosive coffee spilled over tender bruises. Love poems I have written on the breasts of young girls in the street sag into steel cupped undergarments of brutalized adulthood. Love poems I have written on the tattooed arms of the Venus de Milo fall from the fossilized trees of casual bed partners. Love poems I have written rattle their chains like Marley's ghost hungry for ink. Love poems I have written slobber to bite the silly lily throats teenage girls stretch out to entice a vampire's hole punch. Love poems I have written fall from the closet crammed closed years ago when I moved from the erotic neighborhood of flaming lips and happily ever afters, along with the tennis rackets I never used and the pack frame of aluminized Boy Scout bones. Love poems I have written stop me on the street and ask for kisses to tide them over between passions, stand back and shout "Hey I know you, you once put me in a sonnet that you promised would immortalize me, now look at the size of my thighs." Love poems I have written wash down the gutter with the leaves blown off autumn's trees scarred to the knees with hearts carved around the twinned initials of names we can neither reclaim nor recall.