I Love Yous

By Ashley Lister

I was looking through my opus recently and I realised a lot of my poetry could be described as love poems.

Admittedly, these aren’t conventional love poems. There’s a poem about a man who loves a blow-up doll. There’s a poem about a man who loves a woman whom he denigrates for being overweight. And the other week there was that poem about the couple who fall in love on Jeremy Kyle’s show. There are others too and they follow a similar theme of lampooning the dysfunctional often through the narrative of a subverted traditional romance.

None of these ‘love poems’ discuss love in a conventional fashion. But a good number of them are led by a persona driven solely by a motive of love.

If I was sufficiently self-obsessed I could discuss the author’s reluctance to tackle the subject of love with any measure of seriousness. I could perhaps suggest there is some sort of cognitive dissonance apparent within this writer’s need to write about love yet to avoid dealing with its serious connotations.

But I believe I used my ‘bore-the-piss-out-of-the-reader’ ticket last week. And I dearly hope that such tickets are seldom going to stretch to more than a single use for each blogger on here.

So below is my attempt at a serious love poem. Fingers crossed that I can do it properly this time.

I Love Yous

I love yous in the open air

I love yous in the grass

I love yous without a care

I love yous - yous has class.

I love the way yous teaches me things

I love yous more than yous can guess

And I love the way the wise folk say

I should spell YOUS: EE – DOUBLE YOU – EE – ESS.

Ashley Lister