Anti Love Poem

 Anti Love Poem

I advise against writing love poems.

You only end up looking silly

when the grand passion fizzles out –

either quickly, like one of those fireworks

that turns out to be a squib, or else

by dwindling gradually over years

of becoming mundane, locked into

conversations about whether you can 

afford to buy the eldest a new coat

or how long you can put off 

replacing the carpet. No. Romance

is the province of the young. You might

still love each other uproariously

into the wrinkles and/or the fat,

but it’s harder to find charming 

adjectives and comparisons, in the face 

of the roses in one’s cheeks giving way 

to weatherbeaten, or when age spots blemish

those erstwhile graceful or powerful hands.

The longer your true love lasts, the more

those early, rapturous effusions will become

ridiculous, trotted out to your embarrassment

at family parties. If you happen to be famous,

they could appear in books. There might

very well be author photos that don’t even 

look like you now, let alone like someone 

who must have been gorgeous once, or

at least deliciously lovable and wantable

and worth the eternal love of … well,

of this other quaint elderly person.

Prompt #20 for the April Poem A Day challenge at Poetic Asides is to write 'a Love and/or Anti-Love poem' – which I have wilfully misunderstood in order to write an Anti-Love-Poem poem.

(I'm not really anti-love, nor anti-love-poetry! It's a position adopted for this prompt.)

Sharing a few months later with Poets and Storytellers United via Writers'Pantry #82