Nerdy Love Poem

Artists never seem to paint the heart.

I imagine too much paint would be needed

to cover the holes or even out the scarred margins

of most of the things

most of us spend

most of our lives

trying to forgive or maybe just forget.

 

I pin mine to my sleeve now

because it kept falling through the hole

where my inner child used to live

before she chewed her way out

taking the sugar and spice and everything nice.

She left a note with the snakes and snails saying it wasn’t me

she needed to see other people.

 

Last time I looked,

held the ragged thing to the light

it was still beating.

There were cat hairs, grass bits, an Elvis earring, and buttons from clothes I’d never owned

stuck to its skin.

 

I expected him to run

the day it first came out of hiding,

back to someplace where things like that aren’t legal.

But instead he pulled off the tamale pin on his truckers hat

(He keeps his there to remind him to think before feeling)

 

There were dog hairs, 2 marbles, a Hotwheel, and a love note to the Tooth Fairy

fixed all together with Big League Chew.

These days we’re learning to draw each other’s faces with nothing but cheerios

and if we threw our hearts at a wall,

they would break into 100 butterflies we trained to play kazoos