Bedtime clock radio tutelage

It’s a random song from the eighties
and in it I’m struggling
to understand love.

Like it’s something with buttons and handles and levers to be grasped like sex.

Like it’s something akin to the eternal form of ‘best friends’: delivered vacant to children condemned to keep it filled, and alive with the virile threat of dismissal and pressed with the throng of suitable candidates.

Like it’s something auspicious deftly ripped from social worlds.

Failing to find in the songwriter’s treatise searing links to the banalities of liking and friendship.

Then the chorus pipes up:
you never learnt to like favourite things,
never learnt to have a friend and,
even tomorrow, you will never learn to love.

//ends

>> month of poetry 2012