The Birthdays of Ex-Lovers
       

How they pinball through the mind
like the combinations of outgrown lockers,
a mishmash of Virgos and Cancers

on whose soft favor we once depended —
useless now like the few syllables
bored in from foreign language classes,

the equations of elementary physics
they swore we must memorize
if we held any hope for future happiness.

But no — the world knuckles along
whether we remember or not,
hauling everyone for whom the heart once

flounced like a broadsided schooner,
for whom we raised mythologies
all sin-sweet, proud as a dead religion.

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Copyright © 2011 Michael Meyerhofer All rights reserved
from Pure Elesium
Palettes & Quills
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission