I’m not a girly-girl. Never have been. I love flowers, but I detest roses, especially red ones. I hate greeting cards and would rather you just send me a funny email instead. Jewelry? I adore jewelry, but I’m so particular, Sailor Man doesn’t dare try to surprise me. And while dark chocolate remains to be the best damn thing ever, why relegate its delivery to just one day a year? You want to curl my toes? I mean really curl my toes? Give me a pair of wool socks. Seriously. Not the knitted, scratchy kind, but expedition weight, wool, hiking socks from a sports store. Greatest thing next to chocolate I tell ya.

That and a smutty poem.

A fabulous tradition began back in Detroit back in the late 1980’s where people gathered together on Valentine’s Day and held an Erotic Poetry Festival. No love poems to be found here. All naughty, all smut, all the time. It was magnificent. Sitting in a dark bar, drink in hand, listening to someone with a smoky voice recite an erotic piece of poetry…wow….a good poem is a dangerous weapon in the mouth of someone who truly knows how to deliver it.

I borrowed the tradition when I was living in a small southern town below the Mason-Dixon Line running an old theatre. It was an open mic and I was truly thrilled at the number of persons who came out of the woodwork. Talk about community bonding. I hear the festival still lives on.

So in honor of the tradition, keeping it alive and spreading the good (and smutty) word, here’s one of my erotic favorites from that delightfully seductive old codger, ee cummings:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

Happy Valentines Day.

Read a dirty poem to the one you love.

And give them a pair of really good wool socks…it’s cold out, eh?