You bring me back to years blotted from old, discarded
calendars. Everything fitted into prescribed slots
Christmas menus jam-packed with ham and pork recipes.
You enter scripts, rearrange plots, love and pain, my twin
companions undermine my self-imposed abstention.
Pretence and guile inspire the mind to unzip.
Thoughts hover; pasts framed in guilt frames like yesterday’s
portraits I’ve refused to forget. Loving you is not
as simpleminded as it seems to strangers looking in.
I have not forgotten what it takes to prise those fond
endearments from your plain unvarnished lips, then swipe
the sickening sadness from your eyes—
your one recurring curse.