A STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL ON VALENTINE’S DAY.

Olivetti Valentine keyboard

Transcribed below. The typewriter, of course, is an Olivetti Valentine.

We pull out all our best poetic finery:
Our rhymes and meters, similes and metaphors;
We decorate with hearts and Valentinery,
And cart home crates of chocolates and petits fours.
We paw through each and every dime-store greeting card
In agonies of tortured indecisiveness—
As if some cackling honking braying bleating card
Could spare us from our lady love’s derisiveness.
And so I say, Enough of this tomfoolery:
It’s simpler just to buy expensive joolery.