I'm very sorry, Mr. Sunshine-in-your-Hair, Mr. Cocktails-on-the-Cape, but this is all against the rules. I did not summon you up with the subtle incantation of diffused memory to find this other pair of arms about your hips, this other pair of lips against your ear. Who ever asked you to spin her around the dancefloor in front of me, weaving through the denser stars on your little love-winged feet?

You never thought you needed my country wisdom and dirty hands - fine. But what you claimed and what you were look different from this angle of regret. Take your sophistication back. Yes, I am through borrowing it and will send it express mail. Take this new prize to all your gated gables, make her dizzy with your doting, and break her dreamy-eyed on some stinking port shore when the days dawn grey again. I've still got the pictures - I can prove you were here. But I still believe you never knew why.

I made you a rock star, I made you Hemingway, I made you the Library of Congress and the College-on-the-Hill. I wanted to smack the alms from your palm because they were not the reason. And I didn't mind about your pipe and slippers, your early to bed, early to rise, and your midlife crisis. It's only been a few weeks since I was prepared to lay my soul out for you in a midwestern sunset.

Tough luck, buttercup. Someday you'll need to laugh at yourself, and basic black Barbie won't help. Someday night will fall harder than in any capricious twentysomething romance, and she will be too delicate to drag you from the wreckage, too fragile to kiss your bloody lips.

I never stopped wanting you back, no matter how many beds I tumbled through. In the face of your smugness, it was a schoolgirl crush. Something to prove and you proved it. But you meant more than that to me, and I had more still to give. I relinquish all that now, I will give it in spurts to whomever's heat I can have to feel overnight. I hope that someday you want it back, and find it isn't there.