1. 

We would be married in the middle of the night: 

just the two of us and the exchanging  

of cheap silver rings in the street’s light. 

 

2. 

The night would begin as a normal Saturday: 

drinks aplenty, loud music, your hand on my back. 

When we get sick of the noise of the busy bar, 

we’d stumble out onto the sidewalk 

hand-in-hand. A ringing in our ears, 

a quiver in our legs, 

drunken heads filled with love. 

 

3. 

You’d find the rings in a gumball machine 

of a 24-hour convenience store 

and bring them to me, giddy like a child. 

They’d be as light as the fifty cents 

you'd use to buy them.  

 

4. 

When you’d ask me to marry you, 

it would sound like a revelation. 

As if you’d just realized it was possible, 

as if you’d been enlightened. 

 

5. 

Perhaps there’s something to be said about the thought 

put into a marriage. Perhaps there’s nothing  

more important to a drunk man  

than the light in his lover’s eyes. 

 

6. 

Maybe my answer would only come 

from the buzzing in my head, but I’d say yes. 

We’d be illuminated only by the light 

of a streetlamp, a spotlight  

on the exchanging of vows. 

 

7. 

I’d say something about how you are 

the light of my life. 

You’d say something equally cliché: 

maybe call me as sweet as the sugar 

in our kitchen cabinet. 

 

8. 

We’d kiss there, in the street, 

and I’d feel as though I was lifted off my feet. 

We’d start to walk, and I’d start to believe 

that, maybe, marriage was light work. 

Maybe, all it really takes is two quarters 

and a sleepless hope for love to carry on. 

 

9. 

You’d even skip half the way there, 

light on your feet, 

too fast for me to keep up. 

 

10. 

Maybe I’d worry in my head, on the way home, 

about what my parents might say the next day: 

when they realize that their son married  

a man in the middle of the night, 

with no one to bear witness except 

the raccoons in the alleyways. 

 

But even those worries would not be able 

to disturb the moment. They wouldn’t be enough  

to keep me from marrying you, anyways. 

 

11. 

When we’d return to the dark of our apartment, 

I’d open the curtains so we could bathe 

in the moonlight. We’d slip away into sleep: 

entangled, stupid, pending a headache. 

 

12. 

Maybe, in the eyes of the law, we wouldn’t truly be 

married. Not yet, at least, not ’til the morning  

light peeked through our windows, ’til the courts 

heard us swear that we’d be together always. 

 

But in that moment, under the lights, 

there’d not be a single person that could  

convince me that we weren’t  

one.