your gaze was always wider-eyed than mine-
you'd say things were brilliant, i'd say "fine".

They stay up late
And complicate
The things they learnt at school,
They stab their shadows
In the dark
It's cunning and it's cruel.
They drink to sway
(It's all okay),
Their mouths taste sour and frightened-
It's all alright,
"the future's bright!"
This place has them enlightened.

They hold hands and
take turns being outwardly sad,
cry in separate cars on the
way to work, eyes always
sore and checking in the
wing-mirror-
The house is too quiet for
them so they have the TV
constantly on in the
kitchen but it's
nothing like the sounds they're
missing.
Sometimes she drives to the
pre-school and stares in feeling so very
empty and sometimes he
sees her there

(so he turns round and leaves-
they don't speak of it at dinner).

they say that when one door closes,
another opens. and i've always been-
professed to be- an optimist.
(i'm not an optimist. i'm really
not an optimist at all).
the thing is at the moment that doors seem to
be closing and with every clang shut the room gets
darker and it's harder to see, i guess,
to see where those open doors might be
(or if they even are at all,
says a bitter voice in the back of my
mind because self-pity is a thing that
often camps out in my
head right next to the "NO CAMPING"
sign). and i seem to be losing my
grip of things and they keep falling from my
fingers and i hardly notice till i look down at my
hands and see they're gone (and that's when i
scrabble around in the dark looking for them,
looking and looking and looking because i
hate losing things, i can't just-
i can't just lose them)

(except that apparently i can.)