Dish to Spoon

Sometimes I’m sorry I ever ran away with you. 
But not for long. A sign of weakness? 
I don’t think so. Obsessions can be life-enhancing; 
lusts survive although their points of reference 
are gone.  And even though you left me for someone 
exceptional in terms of brain and brawn, that’s not
at issue now, since you’ve long disappeared,
him too, and well before your times.  

There’s no one to forgive so why forget?  
And that I’d not, as though I ever could, 
I’ve made this kind of desert island book. 
Here, look! It’s all the snapshots that we took, 
even the over- and under-exposed 
if they were ones for which you’d posed, 
bound acid-free from courtship days 
through sharing digs till parting ways.
One must be strong for being so unwise.

First published, in an earlier version, in the anthology Gents, Bad Boys & Barbarians, Vol. I