Spoiler Alert

Do not read this poem if you have ever cheated on a pregnant woman or fallen in love with one of your married students or told your wife that you just don’t find her attractive any more and then got mad when she was hurt by your noble honesty. Or if you ever moved out of the home you shared with your wife and eight year old child and went straight to Target to buy a jumbo pack of condoms before you even thought to buy shampoo or toothpaste or a nightlight for your daughter. Or if you ever wrote a love poem at Back to School Night and then volunteered to read it aloud to your New Wife in front of your Old Wife and all the parents with whom you’d been attending Back to School Night for the past seven years.

Do not read this poem if you ever thought that carrying controlled substances across state lines was a reasonable thing to do in the name of art and religion. Or if you call illegal drugs “medicine” or getting high “journeying” in an effort to mask your adolescent attempts to create spiritual meaning around the hole in your heart. Or if you look to twenty-eight year old white men to be your shamans even though they regularly deceive their friends and speak disdainfully of their parents while sleeping with married women and justifying it in the name of enlightenment. Or if you are unable to be in a monogamous relationship without falling in love with this semester’s ingénue and then running home to tell your wife all about it in the name of radical truth and honesty.

Do not read this poem if you ever confused drug-induced intensity with courageous intimacy. Or spent a week tripping in the desert with naked strangers and then came home to condemn your wife as square because she didn’t want to do Ecstasy with you in an attempt to see the face of God and maybe save your marriage in the process. Or if your wife, by the time she asked you to leave and not come back, was so lost in her attempts to adjust her principles that she had banished all but a few tattered shreds of her original dignity and integrity. Or if by the time you left, she was left a bombed-out shell of her former self, unable to discern her own taste in throw rugs or to feel the warmth of a man’s mouth on her breast even as she looked down and saw it there.

Do not read this poem if you ever broke a poet’s heart, even if you believe you had no choice in the matter, even if it was fated to happen. Even if you loved her but didn’t know how, even if you hurt her but didn’t know how not to.