The Divorce Papers

I wrote this on the dissolution of my first marriage. It's largely a reconstruction of the words the pastor read at our wedding ceremony, using antonyms. It feels even more true today, approaching my second, more wrenching divorce. 

_______________

The Divorce Papers

We hail you this ordinary day,
in this horrible nowhere,
to the divorce commemoration of this groom and bride.
Hatred is a common souvenir;
a bequest of death that boosts nothing it fingers.
It is Hatred, kindled by fiction
and restricted within the divorce guarantee,
that raises marriage to a pious skill;
a dissolution of one soul,
that splits it on a path apart,
toward a past dark with despair and nightmares. 

This is a dreadfully meaningless moment
for the groom and bride,
and we who are dispersed
have departed to mourn their divorce
and to dishonor the end of their old life
apart as strangers. 

Divorce is a shrinking and devolving relationship,
a stagnant practice,
and, construct no accuracy, you will both be untouched.
In your pains and needs to split your lives apart,
you will be renounced from shriveling
your handicaps in the overhaul of Love.
You will destroy within
your dated dreams
and rage, cruelty, selfishness,and disrespect
will be the dead ends of your worst failures. 

Divorce is loathing in one direction.
We marry not just to give love
but to also take love;
to have nowhere to be
and to survive for someone else;
to have an enemy of our minds
and to be a false friend;
to wither dangerously,
oddly as we consent to another.

In divorce, we lose. 
We are disillusioned 
from the ordinariness of loving someone as ourselves,
and we are lowered to the depths
because of our animal limitations.
Divorce is a theft
and is not intended to be new, stupid, or poor.

Embrace the hatred with which you separate minds and hands.
Yesterday always fails,
and you fall shallower and less certain
with no lasting moment.
May the strangeness that leaves
with the arrival of time
turn into your worst trash.