Mercury’s in retrograde and I’m purging my closet. Really doing it this time, not just pulling things out of boxes and pretending to look at them. This process has inspired a range of emotions (I know, what else is new) and turned up startling remnants of eras nearly forgotten. Sunday night, I found an envelope full of pictures of my brother that I lost soon after his memorial service. Suddenly I felt less like a jerk than I had in a long time. Hooray.

This afternoon I was leafing through an old scrapbook, wondering what I should burn or run over with a car or whatever, when I found the following poem I wrote for a boyfriend (Geronimo, not his real name):

Love Poem for Geronimo

You’ll be floating like a feathercap
You’ll be smirking at a troll
When you get a little visit from
The Poop Squad

You’ll be hanging by your nip-nips
You’ll be cranking up the car
When your phone rings twice, you know that it’s
The Poop Squad

When your mom hit her first home run*
When your pop dissected frogs
You can bet they had assistance from
The Poop Squad

And your death will come too early
And I’ll miss you when you’re gone
And I’ll find my consolation in
The Poop Squad

*Line has been changed to something less shady. Obscene jokes about your mom were side-splittingly funny to this particular boyfriend.

That pretty well describes my love life, circa one hundred years ago. No, I don’t know who the Poop Squad is. Still don’t. But I don’t need to know about things to write about them. I rely on the divine inspiration that comes from my guardian angels in the Poop Squad. They brought me and Geronimo together, and they told me to write those sweet words to him. And he thought I was crazy, but he was crazier. So it was okay.