As a way of wishing all the lovely ladies on Goodreads a Happy Valentine's Day, I'd like to share this Barry Yourgrau tribute to the throbbing heart aflame with love:
POETRY
My girlfriend leaves me. I become so unhinged that I douse myself with flammable liquid and set myself on fire. I squat in an awkward, hideous position on the sidewalk, bleating her name as I gasp in shock at what I've done. The chaos of flames envelopes me, and the air above me trembles. Passersby scramble away into the street in horror, their faces covered behind their arms. Their screaming gives way to the shrieking of sirens. I topple stiffly onto my side, crackling, unconscious.
I awaken in a hospital. Gradually I grow aware of myself as a load of numbness, suspended over an abyss of pain. I perceive glimpses of the pain in the form of twinges that are shocking in their intimation of whence they arise - like the icy wisps that drift in from the fringes of a gigantic, appalling storm, I realize I have transformed myself into a gross, carbonized scrap of the natural world. I lie immobile in my sarcophagus of gauze in the dim light of drawn blinds. With my one uncovered eye I fix on the cloudy gaze of the plastic bottle above my bed. A garish red hose carries the turbid milk from this vessel down to me. This is now my vital nourishment: a simitranslucent, syrupy liquid that suppresses a pain that would annihilate every tissue of my being. My eye blinks, and behind it quavers a thought in commentary: Yes, how appropriate . . . how very said and appropriate . . .
Periodically a doctor enters my room. He peers down at me. He is youngish, balding, a realist of a certain type. "So, you've done it." he declares quietly, brisk and wry. He glances over my little prosthetic world. "You've turned the emotional into the physical. You're a poet . . . " He shakes his head at my chart and raises his eyebrows with a sigh. "It's all about a girl," he proclaims feelingly. "It's all about a wonderful girl!"
Under my bandages, a thrill of emotion ripples through me, at his instinctive comprehension. Through charred, unguent-shiny lips, I whisper to him the half-sacred syllables of her name. "Don't try to answer," he comments, examining his watch. "No point in it, you're nowhere near capable of speech yet." He looks up and grins. "Know how I know it's a girl?" he asks, waggishly. He displays his clipboard. "Because it says here you soaked yourself in cognac," he announces. "It's always a girl when it's cognac instead of gasoline!" He pulls an appreciative face. "And the expensive stuff too," he adds, "going by the bottle they found. My, my, such a waste." He gives a little wink. He heads for the door. "Ah, you poets!" he cries, flinging aloft a sardonic hand. "What did you light it with, a dried rose?"
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Poetry is one of the many tales of love included in Barry's book The Sadness of Sex
Author Barry Yourgrau, born 1949
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