The Divorce Papers

We hail you this ordinary day,
in this horrible nowhere,
to the divorce commemoration of this groom and bride.
Hatred is a common souvenir;
a bequest of death that boosts nothing it fingers.
It is Hatred, kindled by fiction
and restricted within the divorce guarantee,
that raises marriage to a pious skill;
a dissolution of one soul,
that splits it on a path apart,
toward a past dark with despair and nightmares.

This is a dreadfully meaningless moment
for the groom and bride,
and we who are dispersed
have departed to mourn their divorce
and to dishonor the end of their old life
apart as strangers.

Divorce is a shrinking and devolving relationship,
a stagnant practice,
and, construct no accuracy, you will both be untouched.
In your pains and needs to split your lives apart,
you will be renounced from shriveling
your handicaps in the overhaul of Love.
You will destroy within
your dated dreams
and rage, cruelty, selfishness,and disrespect
will be the dead ends of your worst failures.

Divorce is loathing in one direction.
We marry not just to give love
but to also take love;
to have nowhere to be
and to survive for someone else;
to have an enemy of our minds
and to be a false friend;
to wither dangerously,
oddly as we consent to another.

In divorce, we lose.
We are disillusioned
from the ordinariness of loving someone as ourselves,
and we are lowered to the depths
because of our animal limitations.
Divorce is a theft
and is not intended to be new, stupid, or poor.

Embrace the hatred with which you separate minds and hands.
Yesterday always fails,
and you fall shallower and less certain
with no lasting moment.
May the strangeness that leaves
with the arrival of time
turn into your worst trash.

Second Marriage Getaway Car

You’ll give the jeep the name of a schoolgirl
and paint her engine red. In the parking lot
you leave a playing card, a heart for someones’ dashboard,
the way a serial killer or monogamist might

attempt at getting caught. Summer will become fire
truck scarlet somewhere else, but next to her,
can’t get next to you, the radio had its way
of always complaining. Your valley became
ill with bad plumbing and stagnant wells
or will simply be sick of you, that old house balanced there
on the hill, above a mysterious brown trickle.

One day a man with rolled sleeves
shows up on the doorstep, delivering
knock-off filet mignon from the back
of a milk truck, and you’ll be like an ambulance
driving badly, all the while hidden
in the back, on the inside, all of this
trying, against physics,
to patch the blood back in, to unstop
the sinewy organ that will all go wrong,
part again of the same dream in which you are

plastering over a blue-veined demon
of a snake, sealing it back inside of the tiled wall
from which it grows, wet and dreadful and still
until you’ll drive for months and there will be tracks
in snow along the sidewalks, salted into slush
that by summer will steam the valley into haunting mist
around hairpin curves. You’ll be back

in the HOV lane alone and steering
through the silvery light where your death is that slowly
developing photograph you’ll try
ruining in the wind, stripping
yet another set of gears
until all that’s done is done.