"The Boxer (Woof)" by Guest Failed Love Poet, Melanie Harding

This week's installment comes from a guest poet and friend, Melanie Harding, who suggested that others might just have some failed love poems to contribute here and indeed she is right.  And, since this is Week 3 (relatively speaking), it's probably high time I explain what exactly is a Failed Love Poem, if it isn't painfully obvious already. 

Definition: A Failed Love Poem is a poem that one metes out in the darkest of hours, in the night, to express one's exultation for that special someone and in so doing, doesn't quite hit the mark - either undershooting or overreaching, or performing a reach around and coming up short.  If your heart's desire were to read your lofty stanzas of bequeathed adoration and the first two words that come to mind are, Restraining and Order, then you my friend are a Failed Love Poet.  If your soliloquies about how synonymous your lover's skin is to algae, their finger tips like spores only results in inciting vomitous explosions, then you are indeed a Failed Love Poet.  We write because our hearts cannot speak, and unfortunately, our minds are too plugged with dopamine (or other substances) to pen a Yeats-like homage to Love and thus we make do with our poor plumpy-fingered-misguided-snaggle-toothed inner beast that is yearning for communion with another lost soul we desperately hope is out there!

And speaking of snaggle-toothed, I would like to present this week's Failed Love Poem #3:

The Boxer (Woof) by Melanie Harding


While I watched,
dogs fought
without thought.
Their teeth sunk deep
in a primal embrace.
I long to hold you this way.
I need someone like you:
Ever ready to tear me open
with no desire to lick at my wounds.