Macaroni Portrait of a Love Affair

There once was a girl. (There's always a girl.)
But this one, she was the why of it.
She laughed at me, tripping over my own shoelaces,
And I left them untied, hoping to make her laugh again.
I whispered heavy secrets to her,
The kind that must be spoken with cupped hands and daring proximity.
She kissed me once. (She probably doesn't remember
Because girls can be so guilelessly affectionate,
But I was over the moon for days.)
When she left, I was certain I would never love again.
I had sworn my heart, eternally, to her.
Luckily for me, the attention span of a kindergartner
Does not often reach eternity, so by summer vacation
There was a new girl, (there's always a girl,)
And she quickly became the why of it.

As You Are

"What is to give light must endure burning."
(Viktor Frankl)


Alright, Sal, here's the truth.
Your left breast is smaller than your right,
And, perhaps aware of
This inequity, it bashfully gazes
Outward like a lazy eye.

And your teeth, like the rest of you,
Have never been what you'd
Call perfectly straight, preferring
Instead to lean upon one another,
Comrades in the downtime of the chewing war.

And if we're dissecting here,
I'll acknowledge that you do in fact
Have a streak of strangely-placed obstinacy
And a tendency to leave
The cap off the toothpaste.

It is possible that you will
Never know how to handle money,
Nor intuit when to stop arguing with your mother
Or how much salt to add.

It is possible that these moth holes
In your fabric will not ever be
Patched, and your birthmark
Will show no matter what you wear.

And to all this, I must tell you, Sal,
I will again and again
Say yes.
Because it is through the
Gaps that the light comes,
And through the tears that
We learn to mend.

And for my part, I will
Smile to tell you easily
From the women who wear
Adult braces and pad their bras
And pay surgeons to fix
What, to be honest,
Was never really wrong in the first place.