Ten years ago around this steamy time of year, I was engaged.

Unless I really dig deeply in the fecund soil of pettiness, I cannot say anything bad about her. (In fact, all I can say is that I regret how I treated you and how I ended our relationship. Any present relational sufferings are a well-deserved penance for my past thoughtlessness.) Our relationship was simply–if simply can ever be applied to a relationship–one that should never have happened in the first place, but once it did, neither one of us wanted to let go.

We, eventually, let go.

I found this poem that I wrote about a fight that we once had in her kitchen when, for whatever reason, I started to throw perfectly good eggs into the sink. I unleashed my anger in a manner that could then be easily cleaned.

Though my primary focus is now prose, my earliest writing aspirations were poetry.

What I Think as I Watch You Apply Makeup

Throwing six eggs into the sink—at that time—

Seemed like an acceptable form of anger management.

You wondered that if I would chuck chicken plasma at steel,

What might be other targets: you, the cat, any peaceful morning?

Platonic paradigms reveal themselves as unwieldy,

Clanging against each rung on the ladder of love.

Another time you asked what I was thinking—

Dare I explain: a disordered love, the passions, and the appetites?

Metaphysics, the theological virtues, and the nape of your neck;

Reject any divinity that refuses to incarnate itself.

A lingering hope prevents me from confessing that I will never be

A founding myth, an oft-told romantic tale, or a breathing sonnet.

Yet, Odysseus rejected Calypso and her offer of immortality

For his wife, Penelope, and their bed built from a still-living tree.

Likewise, frustrating you as I cultivate the habit of failing,

I reject Euclidean symmetry in order to tangle myself up with you.