The moon’s gone round
the cuckoo’s clocked out.
I’ve circled six summers without you.

But it all drizzles down
with this half pint of Hennessy.

You taught me the semi-colon
how to make sauce from tomatoes
and how to write from the gut.

Your cologne lives its life out
in the notebook I buried your sonnets in.

What began as a poem, morphs into a recipe
for ways to forget you
and that shirt that you left on my nightstand
full of sweat, sex, and Marlboros,
was cut into rags –
for cleaning the poop up
when kitty kat misses the litter box.