My sister told me a soul mate is not the person who makes you the happiest but the one who makes you feel the most, who conducts your heart to bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in. It has always been you. You are the first person I was afraid to sleep next to, not because of the fear you would leave in the night but because I didn’t want to wake up ungracefully. In the morning, I crawled over your lumbering chest to wash my face and pinch my cheeks and lay myself out like a still-life beside you. Your new girlfriend is pretty like the cover of a cookbook. I have said her name into the empty belly of my apartment. Forgive me. When I feel myself falling out of love with you, I turn the record of your laughter over, reposition the needle. I dust the dirty living room of your affection. I have imagined our children. Forgive me. I made up the best parts of you. Forgive me. When you told me to look for you on my wedding day, to pause on the alter for the sound of your voice before sinking myself into the pond of another love, forgive me. I mistook it for a promise.

She has so many knots in her hair because we are desperate in our fucking. Maybe desperate is not the right word. Think: necessary. Think: éclat. Think the opposite of mediocre and then continue to think that until you grow bored. She is always digging, I am always grabbing, and there is probably something else missing here. When I think about her past, I think about space and how both of them make no sense to me. They are both so big, and I have never slept in a house that large. I get tired just thinking about starting another poem. I write in my journal I could talk about orgasms all day. It is hard to be happy without beer. I am working on my stereotypes. My favorite sitcoms are the ones with the pretty wives, the heavy husbands who wear uniforms to work. Is anyone else concerned about the space around their cuticles? If marijuana is a gateway drug, then what is a blowjob? It is hard to be happy when the best part of your day is agreeing with the ambivalent weather. I like it when married women don’t look at me. Sturdy beds are never overrated. I’ve wanted to use this line for months: Where did all of the wedding rings come from? If people paid to read my poems, I would pay someone to write me better poems. There is only one woman I want to fuck, and that scares the shit out of me.