Valentine, 1993
What is this mark on my belly?
Do you recognize it?

As if two people can be bound by the mutual rememberence of a short film.
Of an 80's song.
Of a bad tattoo.

Girls tell me now to get rid of that mark.
That mar.
That stain.

This unburst thing like a bad but working heart.

That's us, stumbling into a tattoo parlor on Valentine's Day one thousand years ago. Stumbling though we were not drunk. Stumbling because we were children, I more than you.

Do you remember the cold that night?
As if two people can be bound by it.
By mutual flesh pain.
By near innocence.

If that was you in the dingy parlor where the wolf was chained and sad eyed, where the man who called himself an artist wore a handlebar moustache and a leather vest over his bare skin, if you remember any of this, if you remember the good intentions with which we commissioned the making of this bad tattoo and your own, slightly better, if all or any of this is familiar to you, then don't you think you ought to find me?

Not so that we can fall in love again.
(There's no virtue in a second love.)
But so that I can believe as if I'm not the only one who doesn't forget to remember the legitimacy of the things that pass between people. However long ago.

So that I can think that not everybody from the past first sees me through glass and then not at all.

(The way everything fades; the way love never seems eternal).

If you know this tattoo, I mean really know it (and if you don't-I don't mean to exclude you-can you tell what it is?), then don't you think you ought to find me?

To validate the promises of people like us, the mashing together of body, everything that is said in breath and ink?

And the doctors, they'll tell you that to be healthy one moves on, puts things behind her, etc.

(Give me then the irrational women, the ones capable of madness, of extremes of jealousy, who are cursed with an inability to un-remember).

This tattoo, what it says: forgetmenot.

And you, that Valentine's date (and ones like you, those later dates), lost in the world, testaments to the idea that every possession is temporary.

That every ghost can be exercised.

...But some of us, we meant every scar and other mark, whatever they meant when we took them on.

Me, I'm haunted.
Consider it a virtue.

To you then, LK, and those that came after and went as well, and the few that came and went before, and those that have recently come and will soon enough go, and those that will someday come and likewise be gone, I say:
you'll be in my mind longer than I'll be in yours.

Consider that a virtue.
Don't those buy one anything?