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Ever since that first cave man told the woman of his fancy, "Looking at you makes me want to say something where all the words end with the same sound," and then clubbed her and dragged her off to his cave to show her his etchings, most people's first poetic efforts have been expressions of fondness and desire.

And no matter how bad the poem is, when the feeling is mutual, the response is going to be very reinforcing. "You wrote me a POEM?! Oh, it's BEAUTIFUL! That's so SWEET!" Et cetera, et cetera, with kisses.

At this point, the love poem is perfect. It communicated the desired message, and it had the desired effect. But then, with the beloved's ecstatic acclamations ringing in his ears, our fledgling poet takes the next logical step in his literary career: he joins deviantART and uploads.

Back in the good old days, when we had to walk 5 miles uphill through the snow to get to the Internet, (borrowed that line from Zits), young lovers only inflicted such embarrassments on their friends. "Uh, yeah, Zeke. That's, like, awesome, dude. You wrote a pome. Um, so you wanna go skating?" But Zeke is too besotted to skate; he's got to go suck face with Bertha, or if she's busy, go home and write her another pome.

Before the Society of Lovesick Adolescent Poets (SLAP) puts a contract out on me, though, I'm going to jump right to the relatively rare situation in which Zeke actually DOES have some poetic talent beyond what little it takes to impress Bertha.

He already told her in poem number 1 that:
a) He loves her.
b) He loves her deeply and truly.
c) He is going to keep on loving her as long as he lives.
d) She's beautiful.
e) He's never felt like this about anybody before.
f) He wants to spend the rest of his life with her.
g) NOBODY has ever felt like this about ANYBODY before.
h) He doesn't want to do anything except be with her.
i) He really, really loves her.

He'd like to put in another thought, but he's not sure she's ready to hear that part of his feelings, and besides, her dad might read it and ground her again. So he needs to say something different.

Well, different in how he expresses it, at least. The message is still going to be the same, because he doesn't have any new feelings to express. (He would say he does, because he loves her twice as deeply now as yesterday when he wrote the first poem, but if pressed he'd admit that it isn't really a new feeling.)

Were Zeke like the typical teenager in love, he'd just rearrange the lines and throw in a bit about how those feelings are becoming too deep and intense to express in words, a sentiment sure to get him at least to second base.

But he's no longer just a lover, he's a poet now, and in a fateful moment, as he waits for the muse to speak, he heads for the fridge, grabs a Coke, opens it and slugs down half the can, seeing as how he's been too busy being in love to eat or drink much of anything today. And in the ensuing moment of amazement at how refreshing that drink just was, the best Coke he's ever drunk, in fact, he realizes...

HOT DAMN!! He's discovered a METAPHOR! The next poem is done in 30 minutes flat, full of feelings of parching thirst and the sweetness of satisfaction. When Bertha reads it and gives him a blank stare, unable to comprehend the connection between soda pop and endless love, he is stunned. When her father reads it, and does understand it well enough to ground Bertha for the rest of the month, Zeke is almost relieved.

In fact, he is totally relieved, as are his buddies, who knew they'd lost their skating partner as long as Bertha had him, as we all should be, because now Zeke will go home and set love aside (till next time, when he finds a woman who can comprehend his poems) and write about what adolescents know best: angst, loneliness, and the pain of being misunderstood.

Grown up Zeke, along with his brother and sister poets everywhere, still must struggle with the problem of what to say about love. Once you've said what you feel and described how strongly you are feeling it, what's left to build a poem around?

To the mature poet who is also a mature lover, that problem is a wonderful one, because life provides more answers than time to write all the possible poems. Metaphors are only the beginning; there are also countless vignettes that illustrate some subtle aspect of the feelings. The beloved as an individual becomes the subject of the muse's scrutiny, and the best love poetry is sometimes a description of some loveable idiosyncrasy that only a true lover could appreciate. (Think of "When Harry Met Sally" and the speech that begins, "I love the way it takes you 45 minutes to order a sandwich.")

Poetry, like all of the arts, is about life. Part of the joy of loving, to me, is the challenge of finding new ways every day to express or demonstrate not only how strongly I feel about my one and only, but also how my love arises from my awareness of her as a unique individual, how that love inspires me to be a better man, how much I enjoy all the things we do together, how many ways her presence enriches my life, and on and on. (The way I score the "I love you" game, you get double points for statements that don't involve the word "love," triple points for saying it with no words at all, and quadruple for an act of love she won't even know you did.)

To write a great love poem, one the reading public can appreciate, and not just your main squeeze, you need to know enough about the art of loving, and about the art of living, to have something fresh to say on the subject.