I once wrote a girl a poem for her birthday

I know! But at the time it seemed like a good idea. She was so beautiful and cool and I had to do something to stand a chance with her. I’d heard her say once that she liked poetry so I thought well I may as well give it a go. She was called Jessica. Not Jess. Jessica. I think that’s a good way of describing her.

I bought a piece of card and a big pen from a stationery shop and started writing. It was a good poem I think but that was never really that important. I spent ages on it, way too long, really, and even at my most optimistic I thought I’m fairly sure we won’t be reminiscing about this on our wedding day but maybe something will happen. She’s married to a French man now.

At the party I said to her ‘I’ve got you a present’ and explained I didn’t want to give it to her in front of everyone and immediately she must have thought well this isn’t going to end well. We went into the spare bedroom that had the video player in and I gave it to her. I had thought about framing it but I realised I’d done enough already. It’s not like she’s going to put it on the wall. She’s more likely to keep it if she can just put it in a drawer somewhere although I think we all know where that poem will end up.

She looked at it and said thanks and smiled and said no really it’s so nice and I said sorry if it’s a bit weird and she said ‘No it’s nice! But I could tell by the way she looked at it that it wasn’t something she was going to treasure. I could tell in her eyes this wasn’t the right thing to have done. Her eyes were the only thing about her that wasn’t beautiful and to me that meant she wasn’t beautiful. She suggested we went back into the kitchen. I took one of my bottles of beer from the fridge and as I drank it I realised that writing someone a poem for their birthday is a bit like distributing cyanide. You have to give it to the right person. Make sure you don’t drink from the wrong carafe.