History of the love poem

The love poem is sure that the first line scares it, and is told that's a good sign.

No need to explain the desire to create; if feeling the need, however, explain in language a six-year old or a sixty-one year old might understand. Often, it helps to say that the love poem is a poem written for a special occasion, like a birthday.

Expect revision and revison upon revision, while honoring the original impulse.

There will come a time when nothing seems to happen, perhaps toward the middle of the affair or just before the end. It seems to happen to everything and everyone, this great illusion of being too empty or being too full, of not having enough or being given too much.

When a love poem is a poem, the words of the poem live the life they were meant to live, independently but more or less under the same roof; there's never one too many or less than enough. 

The reader and the writer of a real love poem--as opposed to some other kind of poem--are lucky. Somehow they've been given to know their lives wouldn't have been their lives without the other.

And happy birthday, whether it is your birthday or it is not.