Writ large on the side of an underpass was this message:
Ham aspic never solved anyone’s problems. Which, if you
really come right down to it, I guess it never has. Still, that’s
quite a thing to read on a Sunday morning, when you’re out
for a drive and minding your own sunny and blameless business.
Who would bother to write that? And what about perfection
salad? Has it ever rendered the world any more perfect?
Somewhere, there is a masked lover of everything gelatinous.
Somewhere, he raises his forearms over his plate, like a
mantis, thinks, “Everything I love only causes grief.”
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 
This poem is going into today’s lesson for my writing students. Brava!
Oh, that’s great to hear! I’m glad you enjoyed it, and I hope your students did, too. Thanks, complynn.
Just thought I’d share a snippet of one student’s thoughts:
“Everything I love only causes grief.” this simple statement at the ending, parlays to each point the author is trying to make. How simple does something that we love or that is desired cause grief when it is taken to extremes. The other thought is maybe the writer while driving was looking forward to a chance to unwind. Great minds are often plagued with the fact they can not truly shutoff and relax. Perhaps the simple phrase and the pondering of the meaning that followed were a cry out in their own way for the simple attention that they were not able to relax.
I loved how seriously my students worked on the challenge of your poem!
Oh, that’s great! Thanks so much for sharing this with me. What an experience, to hear what such a thoughtful reader picked up from one of my poems! Would you like to know (as best as I recall) the circumstances in which I wrote this poem, or should we leave it a mystery? 🙂 I will tell you that this reader picked up on some tension, busy-ness, and a need to relax that I’m sure were all on my mind at that time.