" Love Hurts. I daresay there’s two or three poems, six novels and at least twelve songs on the subject. That’s how the Janus-faced beast of poetry gets written in the first place, in all its myriad of magical forms. So; why cover this hitherto uncharted and highly original territory? Why leap fearlessly into the unknown, nostrils flared, eyes flashing fire? Well, in the name of love, lust and limerence, why on earth not? Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, yet also vital, valuable and necessary. My last tête à tête gave me plenty, incorporating elements of the forbidden, of rebellion, pornography, pregnancy, parental approval – followed by fury – of infidelity, friend estrangement, life on one island that was heavenly and a second that veered between purgatorial and infernal, of violence, miscarriage, masturbating Indians, pepper spray, antipathy, disloyalty, evictions, a planned future, failed globetrotting and habitual lies, whilst being indicative of a wider, all-encompassing social corrosion, and while the story itself may remain merely hinted at or alluded to in the course of this generalised polemic, it’s as worthy or valid as any other such tale told round the campfire and whispered across the beaches of the world.

All life’s a roll of the dice, tiger; ride into the bastard storm and if your wounds hurt, be grateful you survived to lick them, even in the darkest nights of the soul when the sun is a mattress fire the god of your love died in. Love Hurts, and in a stupendous and savage cosmos, it’s my right to sit at the keyboard and bleed. Besides, love, poverty and war are the necessary accoutrements to a fulfilled life; this is the all-encompassing theme of our human condition and the crooning, persuasive symphony of that philosophically unfathomable miracle of life itself… especially as love leads to poverty and war. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, after all. I certainly am… we choose our own chains...

~excerpt, "Love Hurts "

― Daniel S. Fletcher