The scariest day of the year is approaching fast. Will he…? Won’t she … ? Don’t they …? Should I …? is it legal to … ?

I’d remove Valentine’s day from the calendar, except my powers don’t extend quite that far … yet. The gifts are tacky and / or market forced upon us, everybody feels a little squeamish, and desperation hits town like a tsunami.

Here is the perfect solution. We are of course all literary types. What better gift then than an entire volume dedicated to lerve? And not just lerve, but lerve in all its strangeness. Weird love, Alien love. Impossible love. Deadly love. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for someone else, and if they respond weirdly, its ok, you were just being like, all ironic and post-modern.

But buy it you should, post-haste. “Love Hurts.” You know it does, and you know you want it. Its speculative fiction, and its about love. What’s not to like?

For the lover’s month of February, there is a promotion over at Goodreads which you can check out just by left clicking on this strangely highlighted text right here.

And in advance, here is a poem (for want of a better word) for Valentine’s Day:

 

Cute girl at the Indian take-away

She doesn’t just have eyes for me,

the girl who serves me Tandoori.

Her quizzical glance and little smile,

is not an exchange of irony,

though I do react,

I cannot resist,

when she swallows me in

with big dark eyes

and the world shrinks down to size,

a planet built for two.

I sip on my mango lassi

while I wait for my curry,

and I watch while she does it again,

one after the other,

with all the men.

At last I comprehend.

She finds us hard to understand,

she speaks English but is not fluent

in Australian.

She stares straight at me

with huge eyes like an owl’s,

trying to comprehend

my flattened vowels.

Totally absorbed,

in the groove,

concentrating on how my lips move.

The tremble of her little duck pout

is just her working out

the words I said

by whispering them again

in her head.

“Tandoori chicken roll

on plain naan.”

“With mint sauce?”

“Of course.”

Smile.  Yearn.