My Valentine to You

after Marge Piercy

The pain is intolerable.
I can’t do it, you say, it’s killing me.

Implosion moments away.
End approaches,
Death hovers,
Personal apocalypse taunts.

Yet your veins still pulse
Your heart beats,
Lungs inhale.

Perhaps out of spite.

Perhaps merely to fortify you
For the next round of heartache.

Thomas Moore offers words of consolation
About the bounds of sorrow and heaven’s place.

They fall as flat
as the greeting card
on which they belong.

Your equanimity long gone,
Even Buddha’s thoughts seem over-rated.

You surmise
they lived too early to know true suffering.
that among its many accomplishments,
modernity must have advanced emotional misery.

Then your dear friend’s words
land absurdly near you --
Celebrate Valentine’s Day:
The day when a saint was beheaded
His severed body dragged
Through the streets of Rome.


(cc) Karen G. Johnston