Unicorns are forever

Thank you to my friend Rosemary for sending me a link to Holy Taco's 30 Awesomely Bad Unicorn Tattoos: A Gallery. It is hilarious but also very, very sad. It's hard to pick a favorite, but the #1 unicorn peeing rainbows on a cupcake is probably it. And to think that's on someone's body. Forever.

Marriage, too, is supposed to be forever, so I feel that Ellen Bryant Voigt's "A Marriage Poem" is appropriate here. Not only does it mention unicorns, but it also, at times, seems to be speaking directly to the unicorn tattoo getters of the world:

This is what is done with pain:
ice on the wound,
the isolating tourniquet—
as though to check an open vein
where the self pumps out of the self
would stop the second movement of the heart...

Or:

He asks of her only a little lie,
a pale copy drawn from the inked stone
where they loll beside the unicorn,
great lovers then, two strangers
joined by appetite:
                it frightens her,
to live by memory’s poor diminished light.
She wants something crisp and permanent...

But really, you should read the whole poem. It is quite good.