Welcome To The Home Of St. Valentine

Blessed reader:

The poems that follow are an exploration and an affirmation of the glory of human love. For ten years, Chuck and I have striven to find the truth. Yet, somehow, that truth has proven elusive to us. These poems are our best and latest efforts to bring to you, our readers, the truths that we have come to know through our tireless and endless search. Enjoy.

Valentine's Lullaby

In the second month
the fourteenth day dims.
A frozen shadow grows o'erhead
casting black the Lovers' gaze.
Senseless in their headlong haze
to the icy whisper they will not hear:
The siren song of Valentine
Sung through lips, raw sores incarnadine -
Come to me, my love,
My downey pillow,
My tomb...

For interpretive reading by Jed with piano accompaniment by Chuck click below:
http://members.cox.net/chuckrainey/valentine2-14-05.mp3

Love's Flight

Love awakes.
From beneath the tangled festering linens
in the dank dungeon where She writhes,
Her eyes gaze with longing at a shaft of light
pouring from freedom's portal.
Bouyed by mirth, the joyous flight from cold darkness,
She ascends the slimy stairs to heaven's light
only to have the dungeon door slammed tight.
She slinks back to her shackles,
Her descent, again, into shadow
limned by images of the giggling grimace of Valentine,
his gnarled knuckles gripping the key.

Valentine's Void

Today Valentine is in my heart.
Like a cold stone he lies, unmoved and unmoving from yesterday,
and the yesterday before that.
He remains stagnant on this day as he has been for all time.
But today is Valentine's day, the day when he raises one flabby leg heavenward
to expel his gaseous message to the lovers of the earth.
And from the fathomless depths of his great folds of flesh arises the
stifling stench:
The stink of futile longing,
The putrid emanation of purloined purity,
The Rot of Love.

Valentine's Promise

This morning the shadows hide in fear.
Yet, it is not the stinging rays of their harsh master from which they cower.
For even the Sun shivers, engulfed in a looming blackness.
Saint Valentine has returned!
And even as the forces of darkness cringe, two young Lovers coo and cluck,
Holding hands, oblivious to the afternoon freeze.
Lovers Beware!
Valentine's Promise is the sheath of a knife disguised as a dewy rose.
Once wielded, our lovers will be ended in a bloodless goring,
Awakened from flaxen delusion,
Naked, shivering
In seperate corners of a bowery hotel room:
Valentine's eternal triumph!

A Valentine Vision

My eyes close on this Darkest of Days with neither poem nor tender word.
And still through heavy lids the stinging visage smoulders on scorched sockets.
For once again, the devil,Valentine, with scarlet cloak and victorious sneer,
From his fiery pit erupts.
Lovers, Beware!
Beneath his cape he conceals a dagger.
Behind his smile - your broken heart.

The Song of Valentine

Outside the tulips smile unconscious.
Inside the yellow walls wail as the piano commences that familiar aching pall.
'Tis the Song of Valentine,
ascended once again to fill the punchbowl of my heart with his filthy venom,
And I will drink. Oh, yes. I will drink
Valentine, you are the hole where once my heart lay.
Mercy.
Have Mercy.
Pieta!

Valentine's Night

What cry wafts through my desolate garden on this subconscious morn?
Could it be the stray cat who sighs dead in the mountain lion's hungry teeth on the distant hill?
Perhaps I perceive the relentless gnashing of termites gnawing tirelessly at my withered foundation?
Alas 'tis neither; for today is the Day of Valentine,
and what I hear must be the trembling of Intimacy and Romance,
dressed in their banal trappings of candy red, bemoaning their impending unveiling.
How can the young lovers promenade on the street below
deaf to their dying cries that now blare through the day like a crashing train?
And how, as the daylight wans, can those lovers lie together,
impotent and oblivious, as Valentine's evil symphony's opening ostinato shakes and cracks the black clouds asunder?
And as His Day gives in to Night, do they not hear the sudden shrieking silence as the accursed Valentine, Bastard Son of Love, lifts the glittering scarves from the, alas!, wrinkled heads of his hated stepsisters?
Behold now, Lovers, the rotten corpses of your fallen idols!
Some may be immune to the boiling stench or the scorching horror of this fatal apparition.
Yet all will succumb to the damning truth, the emptying of the heart:
That this Valentine's Night will neither fade nor falter,
But will fester and swell
In its red glare
For all time.