She meant no sin
or so she claimed in tears,
A move defensive, shaped by buried fears.
Love was the thing she could not quite embrace,
So said her shrink, with sympathetic face.
I knew not what those softened insights meant;
I came to claim what pride had barely lent
The remnants left behind, not things, but me,
Fragments of self-lost to our history.
My trust, my dignity, my sense of grace,
The parts of me once daring to have place
In dreams renewed, in hopes that bled too long
Now gathered in the ruins of the wrong.
Yet I was calm, composed in voice and stance,
As one who’s learned to meet such circumstance.
We met within a sterile, rented room
To pass the weight of love’s remaining gloom.
A suitcase packed with scattered, minor things,
Yet each still bore the memory it brings.
And after talk of weather, roads, and rain,
I summoned up a ride to flee the strain.
But there, her head upon my waiting lap,
A pose of peace, of tenderness, of trap.
A gesture soft, familiar from before,
That opened wounds I thought I’d sealed and stored.
She set me free, no chains, yet tightly bound,
As pride and all her handmaids gathered ‘round.
They whispered truths I dared not trust too deep,
And stirred the fire I thought had gone to sleep.
A flicker rose, a warmth I knew too well,
A moment’s haze where clearer judgment fell
Until I saw the woman at her gate,
Now lying where I lay, to share my fate.
In beds that once were ours, now not my own,
Where echoed still our breath, our love, our moan
I once was she, enthroned in passion’s keep,
Now just a ghost beneath the tangled sheet.
But I, at least, have claimed what peace I can,
For I have washed those sheets.
