Love Poetry and the Middle-Aged Woman

For years I've written romantic "love" poetry to my wife. Oh, sure, I publish the cheesy stuff on this warped blog, but I also write poems that my wife weeps over and then hides in her sock and bra drawer. But the problem with poetry is that, as a woman ages, she becomes immune to the effects of romantic poetry.

Take this recent Valentine's Day as an example. I handed my wife a thick, greasy sheaf of poems on Monday night, poems that I had worked on for months, poems comparing her to a summer evening or praising certain bodily charms that, if not for the poetry itself, would have warranted my arrest and conviction on obscenity charges in many states. Still, for all of this, the middle-aged woman merely yawns in the face of such poetic mastery and utters, "That's nice, dear."

Nice?! I was hoping she would call her mother and say, "Mom, you were wrong about him. Thirty years ago you told me he would never amount to a pile of soap suds and now look at him . . . wildly successful, a great husband, and I don't have the words to describe his technical prowess in the sack. That, and you should read his poems. My knees buckled while I was running the vacuum cleaner. What words!"

No, but my poems have become nice. That's the middle-aged woman way. It's all she can muster. Giving my wife poetry at this juncture of our lives is similar to handing her a bottle of cleaning solvent or a scrub brush. She'll thank me for the gesture, but inside she's just numb because she's seen it all before and she regards my romantic expressions in much the same way as she would when reading the tiny instructions on a jug of Clorox. She doesn't need to read the instructions any longer, and she knows I have nothing new to offer. She's seen all my moves, and I lost my pivot and my jump shot years ago.

I'm not giving in, however. The way I figure it, I'm bound to write a love poem to my wife that will jostle her someday. Which is why I'm working on a poem about my untimely death and the loneliness she will feel when she buries my corpse with my computer and my manuscripts. She will mourn me for three days before she remarries and spends the entirety of my pension on motorcycle accessories and a Sleep Number mattress.

It's going to be my best love poem ever. But it ain't gonna be nice!