Ah, Valentine’s Day! The flowers! The chocolates! The passion! The absurdly ridiculous expressions of love! What is it about romantic love that makes us feel like a god but act like Pee-Wee Herman? You can take the most sane, rational, level-headed person on the planet, smite them with Cupid’s arrow, and they become instantly stoopid. This day is full of silly and inane ways of gloriously and garishly showing the one you love just how much they turn you into a strangely cartoonish version of yourself, clad in full red, pink and lavender hues.

I have certainly been guilty of the wackiness of love. Perhaps there is good reason for this. Love makes you giddy. Love lifts you out of yourself. Love gives you wings. So you flit and float like a drunken pigeon, crash landing into the window pane of L’Amore.

To the many, many people who endure Valentine’s Day as someone without a partner (i.e., those who consider it “Singleness Awareness Day”), this day is enough to make them ill. You can’t blame them. Love makes us all look bonkers and do bonkerish things.

In the spirit of that weird and wonderful side of love, that Pee-Wee Herman side in us all, below is a ridiculous poem I composed for my wife, Monique, on Valentine’s Day five years ago. It is very hard to rhyme anything Valentine-appropriate with “Monique” (freak? geek? leek?) so I decided to use the nickname she was known by many, many moons ago in our college daze…

I Love Mo

Written Feb. 14, 2012

I love Mo, you know

When cold winds do blow

When down comes the snow

Yo! I love Mo

I love Mo, you know

When the ice melts and goes

When the grass starts to grow

Yo! I love Mo

I love Mo, you know

When the sun smiles down below

When the flowers put on their show

Yo! I love Mo

I love Mo, you know

When trees go orange, red and yellow

When cool wind again does blow

Yo! I love Mo

I love Mo, you know

Through times of joy and times of woe

Together in life hand-in-hand we go

Yo! I love Mo