An Assortment of Love Poems Written with the Assistance of a Pamphlet Entitled “How 2 Write Love Poems That Don’t Suck” Distributed by Delias.com, a Clothing Company That Caters to Pre-Teen Girls

1. Write a poem that is only seven words long.

   Your girlfriend is a freak-ass. Dump her.*
   
   * hyphenate = 1 word

2. Choose something you associate with your cutie (the color blue, the letter X). Go for a walk and notice everything that is associated with that thing. Return home and write a poem that includes all the things you noticed.

   The rat skitters out of the dumpster
   the virus drifts across the city
   on a stale wind
   in the form of
   cups and papers and flyers and cigarette butts
   picked through by the hungry
   crawled over by the infested
   dripping down the streets in a river
   like the sludgy brown of your eyes
   and the matted fur of your legs
   and the addled brain in your trashed out head, love.

3. Write a poem that uses “diminishing rhymes,” that is, a poem in which each rhyme sound contains that rhyme after is (heartthrob, throb, rob).

   No longer my heartthrob.
   You make my bad knee throb
   and I think I’m in love with your brother Rob.
   

4. Cut random lines from a newspaper. Write a love poem that alternates between those words and your own.
   

   Palestinian officials quickly condemned Israel for acting like a “state above the law” in its continued use of assassinations to eliminate Palestinian militants.
   
   Which is kind of how I feel sometimes when you yell at me.
   
   Mexico has plenty of natural gas and oil in the ground but lacks the technology and money to exploit them fully.
   
   But you exploit me fully every day.
   
   Many economists have said Congress can rarely pass tax cuts quickly enough for them to affect downturns, which usually last less than a year.
   
   I do hope we can pull through this little downturn, dear.
   
   The roundworm is a little tube of a creature with a body of 959 cells, of which 302 are neurons in what passes for its brain. Humans have 100 trillion cells in their body, including 100 billion brain cells.
   
   I used to love you a lot more, I think.