december
in those early days
when we were young & poor
& childless & reveled in
the marriage bed we needed
nothing more than feeling
skin on skin, whispers in ears,
the memory of the other's smell
as we went about the tasks
that made up our days
& what little money we had
didn't matter as the future
was before us, arms held wide
in welcome until little by
little those arms became a
chokehold as child after child
arrived & the house we somehow
managed to buy slumped to slow
ruin around us as maintenance
deferred grew in interest unpaid
& now as I hover near the end of
a career spent with ass in seat
& red pen to page & the marriage
bed morphed to separate rooms,
what drives me now is not exactly
love but not exactly not, a slow
comfort of habit that's become
an addiction to longing for what
once was before we knew what
our lives would eventually become