I have destroyed her.
Through my own immature selfishness,
My hypocrisy,
I leeched away her love, her kindness,
To leave only the sadness and the debts:

It is so simple, she said,
A year ago in warning:

The most important thing is love

There is no excuse, I know
Too late to change what is, what was
As she sleeps, now confined, ill
With no love - real, clinging, caring - to break
The clinical bleakness where she dwells.
And I - cast out before then by agreement -
Wait here, over eighty miles distant, alone with no family, no home:
Tears, wine, the music of memories a fair if unaccepted exchange
For her presence, the touch, her laughter, that smile.
 

She desired such a simple, selfless love
I in childish tantrums of unimportance
Seldom gave, blind, blinded
By years-long dreams, of Destiny.

I have no excuse, and must carry the knowledge
Of such terrible suffering caused;
Hoping in hope of forestalling some person's future pain
By words such these words forming as cloud form
Earth-slowly.

But the world, the wine, in a suicide of sickness
Conspire to make me forget:
Yet I must, must, strive to remember
For to forget is to demean, to descend down in darkest cave-darkness
To who, and what, I was
Before.

But now: now, all I wish and need
Is to die
As if my dying might end my knowing, my pain
And bring my wife back
To happiness and to health