Birthday Reciprocation

For my 25th birthday, a month and a half ago, my good friend and poet Kyle wrote me this birthday poem:

Happy Birthday to the kind of man we all ought to want to become, the kind of man who makes others feel less like men while simultaneously being more for having known him, the kind of man who gives the goddesses he encounters reason to believe in the gender he comes from. Thank you, Marc, for empowering my simple and unworthy being, for progressing the integrity of all of us rogues who never even dreamed of having a sliver of it until you drew near.

My pride in you brings tears to my face, and it's the salt of those tears that flavors my regret of not having shared the anniversary of your birth with you, the man who, as legend has it, was there.

I wish I was. I wish I could sing about it in the key of B major, for Major Birthday. I wish you a happy birthday where friendship is the gift that keeps on giving and sadness is the only candle that gets blown out. I wish to be the Marilyn Monroe to your JFK. More than that, I wish to be the leap in every year you take in approaching old age. I wish sympathy for every other century that hasn't had you in it 25% of the time.

Your right arm was born, followed by your left, and the sky came to know Lightning and Thunder. Your bottom was smooth as a baby's bottom, and now they say a baby's bottom is smooth as yours.

Yours is the only chapter of facebook I care to read.

It is also the only chapter I care to read in braille.

Leave it to you, Marc--it's your birthday and you should be getting gifts, and still we are the ones getting all of your presence. I'll be damned if I'm not ashamed.

Ashamed, of course. Grateful, every single year.


So of course I felt I had to hit him back with a painting.