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"Some assert..." Some assert that Valentine’s is sweet custom, quite benign, a way that children make a start, toward learning love’s dark, subtle art. They learn to play their proper parts with lines from pastel sugar hearts, progress from crush to puppy love, and soon thereafter comes the rub. For love is not a playground game, it’s more blood-sport that wounds and maims. A lad soon learns that a fair lass can shred his paper heart and laugh. A lass may learn that this same lad can start out sweet and then turn cad. But best to learn these lessons young, like music or another tongue; it’s harder if you wait too late, like fatal mumps in middle age. Some assert that Valentine’s is a menace, quite malign. Ask those who staff the crisis lines and hear those callers lose their minds, who haven’t felt love’s lucky spark, like beasts not paired for Noah’s ark. On this one day they lose all hope, feeling they have missed the boat. Yes, love’s a blessing, love transcends, a sweet conjoining of means and end. But romance is like inspiration, it may spurn duty or obligation, fail to rise to rise to expectations, and flees full-speed, brass-band occasions. It prefers a subtle signal, a cold, electric, winter night, a heart content with being single, tempest, courage, key and kite.                                        (c) 2004 David J. Essex 20470

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Valentine for D. I’m trying to write your Valentine, without resort to hackneyed rhymes, things like pines, and fine and mine. It’s not so easy, I now find, Hallmark has already mined all the ready rhyming lines, plucked the fruits of low-hung vines, leaving things like tine and swine. Swine, I think, will not incline a lady’s heart, much less her mind, to passions torrid or divine. And so I’ll try, some other time, perhaps when we can meet to dine, tested tactics like fine wine or just expressions less contrived.                                               (c) 2003 David J. Essex  20471

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Valentine #3   Some contend that Valentine’s is completely asinine; but they don’t run the diamond mines or profit from the restaurant lines. They do not derive their pay from selling sexy lingerie. They must not be chocolatiers, or no-tell moteliers. They don’t make the greeting cards or the drugs that make men hard. I think the system soon would crash without the February cash. So if, perchance, you’re not in love, you’re not by that plain fact absolved. All of us must do our part. Go out and get a store-bought heart.                                                              (c) 2005 David J. Essex.  20472

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Valentine #4 Coincidence that Valentines’ falls in the dreariest of times? Between the New Years’ resolute and facetious April Fools’ comes this phony “holiday” when we cheapen what we say with others’ words on mass-mail cards and vows on sugar candy hearts. But what’s the sin and where the harm if a winter day is warmed and we’re let in on the Holy Joke which trumps experience with hope?  (c) 2006 David J. Essex. 20473

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Valentine for A. It’s a B-league holiday, no one gets it off with pay, except in cases like today, with snow and sleet and freezing rain. Most times this would correlate to my own romantic state, but this year I am glad to say that after work I have a date. Well have some flowers, chocolate, and I expect we’ll drink champagne, then put a record on to play and leave the world to its cold fate. (2007) 20474

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By Your Works Shall We Know Lovers do protest too much; it starts to sound like so much guff. I-love-you’s just too on the nose, sounds true as politician’s prose. Regan’s claim, and Goneril’s how much they love and always will are often prologues to a jilt a dagger plunged up to the hilt. Truer silence, like Cordelia’s, eschews loves lying echolalia. 20475

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Stigmata – Young Girl on the Bus Her flesh is heir to such light shocks, as deck her neck in paradox: a hickey and a crucifix the angels’ struggle there depict. (2008) 20476

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