More useful to you
When I’m here
And I’m quiet
And nightly
My psyche  
Is shrinking like violet
And no one to turn to
To talk to
Beguiles
The moments we have
To defensive on trials
The miles and miles
I’ve tread in exiles
I’ve fled
With but dread
And the words it compiles
To somehow coherently
Articulate it
Relate it
To all of them
Then I restate it

Maintaining the guise
Of a normal life
Taking
Its toll on my
Loving wife
Hearts have been breaking
And I have been making
It worse
In exhausting
All options
To keep us contained
In our coffins
More often than not now
Despite
How we’re home
We resort to
Withholding our thoughts
All alone
All along
Still enamored,
Still genuine love
But it’s like
We’re preparing
To be
Deprived of
One another again
Can’t accept
It’s the end
Can’t cause anymore wounds
That we know we can’t mend
Can’t relinquish the feeling
Serenities ease
If the ghost of you
Swept away
In the sea breeze

Always the mind
Of a younger man
Mine
Has become suddenly
A much older one’s
Spine

Choose to hate me because
Choose to love me despite
What I get into thinking
Alone in the night
When by day
Just a regular
Cellular
Leveller
Revel in
Devilishly
Rendering
Relative
All my impersonal
Woebegone
Songs
To the rest of us
Just predisposed
All along
To be wrongfully
Righteously
Sure of our ways
So convinced
Moral rectitude
Isn’t a maze
But a page
In a book
Higher plane
In a prayer
Like a little lamb
Crams
To get in…
Doctrinaire

When did I become
But a shadow to you
But a faint recollection
Of all we’ve been through
Barely anything left
Worth redeeming us now,
Of love, all but bereft
I just can’t fathom how
We could come to this
Bottomless,
Cyclically toxic
Exhaustion
The falling out
Fault lines
Increasingly often
Can’t soften the blow
When it has to be said
Can’t keep feigning alive
When inside
We are dead
And what we can’t control
Tears apart
At the seams
What a future together
Had woven in dreams
Will eternally haunt me
Again, how I fail
So abjectly,
Completely
To build it to scale
What I feel,
What I know exists
Boundless for her
When it keeps on collapsing
In what we once were
Plain and simply
Companions
With more time to spare
But what looms in the distance
Discordant despair

Nowhere you could go
That I won’t
Come and find you
Nowhere you could be
That I wouldn’t
Remind you
The time could go by
Without me there beside you
And I will still strive
To uncover
What hides you
Reside in your deepest
Recesses
And reach
Out to lift you up,
Strengthen you
When you feel
Weak
But we keep speaking over
Each other again
After vowing to not so
Discordantly end
The next argument,
Or the relationship
Sinking
In dreading,
Regretting
The what were we thinking

Venture forth
Not for
The promise
Of better days
Do so
Pursuing
The founding
Of better ways
Forward
And onward
You go
Undeterred
When in doubt
Trust yourself
Not just words
That you heard
And assured
You’ll be fine
You were here
For a while
Not perfect
But flawed
Ever more
Versatile