THIS is no music to the ears of sensitive men or romantic stallions who think a serenade will never run out of style: “There’s nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh.”

Whistle away your fantasy. Or so Ingrid Bergman’s character in “Notorious“ may as well have clucked her tongue off her cheek for all of us who might have fancied it cool to wear Cary Grant’s shoes.

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But, hey, isn’t it utterly unhip to take our cue from a black-and-white Hitchcock tale in this day when there’s nothing hotter for sweethearts sneaking into the cineplex than Michael Bay’s testosterone-shot blockbusters?

Kick me, but it’s getting harder to tap the toes along a heartwarming tune. Especially when you got this downbeat habit of spouting smoke in the ears while groaning under the weight of headlines, always reliable with its humor-proof refrain: Pain is prosaic.

In the ink-smeared face of it, even someone so lyrical like Neruda couldn’t help but sound like a gangsta rapper in one of his popular poems. “It so happens,” he grumbles, “I’m tired of being a man.”

That might be an apt thought balloon for the three fathers who reportedly killed their partners in three separate incidents in Cebu a few days ago. Two of the men—-one of them took the lives of his two young children—-also ended up dead with self-inflicted wounds. It’s enough for someone with a mouthful of dirge to get tight in the throat, struck mute.

Sophocles would be at home, too, in America where a “pandemic of violence by men against women, men, and children… has killed more people in America than flu.” According to a report, 68 people have died recently in these “mass killings” including 20 children and seven police officers.

Home sweet home, but that’s a runaway concept according to estimates: An abusive relationship transpires every 15 seconds somewhere in the United States.

What else is new? Even before the case of O.J. Simpson hogged the news, a 1991 survey already recorded the deaths of 5,745 American women. “Six in every 10 women who are victims of homicide were murdered by someone they knew,” said the survey.

“About half of these women were murdered by a spouse or someone with whom they had been intimate.”

Though it rings a bell, “domestic violence” does sound like bloody trite label. Damn if we feel numb. Battering our heads ad nauseam, it has long been thought of as a feminist’s headache. A women’s issue, to say the least.

“But domestic violence must no longer be viewed as a problem only affecting women,” stresses Athealth.com , an American online provider of mental health information and services for mental health practitioners and their clients. Spouse abuse, after all, is taking a societal toll, “overwhelming our courts and hospitals, spilling over into our streets, and filling our morgues.”

As far as searching for solutions go against this domestic epidemic, explains Athealth.com, “men have a critical role to play in doing so.”

If that seems like a fairy tale, that’s no less true for a bestselling book that ushered in the mythopoetic men's movement. “There’s something lacking in men’s lives,” laments the poet Robert Bly in “Iron John” where the titular character out of Grimms’ pages is emblematic of the epic quest out of the shadow of macho anxieties toward a reimagined, more emotionally-resonant sensibility.

But a poet’s words would often cause nosebleed, and a police report is far more accessible like an audio of a balladeer’s gut. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” quipped another writer. That, sad to say, is way too far our earshot.

(geemyko@gmail.com)