Babies, for starters.
Sure, people write books about
the tiny mammals, but yours didn’t
pop out with a personalized
Baby Home Repair Manual tucked
under its arm, did it? All that crying…
how do you fix that?

Hearts, because they’re all the time
getting broken—or certainly creased
and cracked—and again, no how-to
for your model, though medical folks
have some ideas about how to fix
them mechanically. That doesn’t
help our floundering, love-ravaged,
hurt-feeling’d pumping engines.

So we are left to realize how
much can’t be repaired even when
we desperately want it to be—
cruelty inflicted by the thoughtless
or the downright mean-spirited,
not to mention the anguish of
watching those heading off into
the we-don’t-know-where,
trudging toward the other side
where we on this side can’t yet go.

That we’re the ones who must stay
behind clutching all our broken bits
spins our struggling minds. Perhaps
each of us was issued a nifty instruction
booklet before we landed in these
bodies, and we’ve just mislaid it,
or put it in a safe place that
we’ve forgotten.

So, optimists that we are,
we keep hunting for the manual,
wishing someone would deliver
a new one special-overnight-hurry-up-
express, in an easy-to-open box
with very clear directions
in large print:

Begin here. Step one...