Rick: “Remember, this gun is pointed right at your heart.”

Captain Renault: “That is my least vulnerable spot.”

– from “Casablanca”

I never said farewell. I only said goodbye.

Sayonara. See you in the funny pages

I was really quite glib, for someone whose

heart was spurting like an oil well

I blame Hollywood, that Technicolor

puppy-mill of sex, violence and propane

illusion. I thought because there was

no trench coat, no airplane, no fog,

that we’d come back together, two

tectonic plates shifting into one

another after playing a few millennia

at being different continents

a fierce instance of hit-and-run

geology. I thought we’d at least

exchange insurance information.

How could I not smile at you

when I’ve seen you without pants?

How could I not pick up the phone

when I once carried your first grade

photograph in my wallet like

a Byzantine icon or a condom?

I planned to wish you happily

ever after, so generously you’d

feel like a tank of bad diesel gas

or a felon with a handful of

pen-pal marriage proposals -

or the movie company that

passed on a Bogart screentest.

Look, a kiss is never just a kiss.

I’ll give you that much. Here’s

what happend as time went by,

the events that signaled the end

of a beautiful friendship:

Between entropy and

galactic shift, I caught a

case of whiplash. Our talk

soon had less meaning than

a conversation with a petstore

parrot. You looked at me and

saw lunchmeat instead of

Ingrid Bergman. I took one look

at you and sang like a bird –

started naming names before

I was even asked, lighting cigarettes

with the end of my bitterness and

enrolling in plastic surgery charm

school. In the end, it was better you

stayed shrink-wrapped in my head,

watering the lawn and eating cold

meatloaf from a Tupperware bowl

You preferred that I dance salsa and

procreate with a protagonist of vague

form, someone with a ten-speed mind

who knows the answer to questions

like “Why not?” and “What rhymes with

orange?” You are only human, and male

to boot. The odds are fat that you

found a Star Search runner-up to help

you fold the newspaper neatly, and who knows

the value of sleeping with makeup on.Twenty-six

is a lucky number when you’re craving someone

younger. Once we’d said all the nursery rhymes,

there was nothing to it but to split our molecules

evenly — as cataclysmic as splitting the atom. (What

can nuclear apologists say? Los Alamos was lonely)

We agreed to share custody of the oxygen but

decided to rent separate moons and skies. I’m

sorry I only said goodbye. If I’d known I wouldn’t

see you again I’d have cried icicles, washed your

hair with wine, skated around you in drunken,

sobbing circles, plagiaried sonnets, watched

Lifetime channel movies and demanded

a recount. I would have held a water gun

to my head and wasted days engaged in

desperate stichomancy, so reluctant would I be

to admit that you could exchange presence for

memory, that your heart is your least vulnerable part.