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When We Are Left Alone In The House

just you and me
i am 48 and you will be 45 the next day
and we are left alone because they all have to be in their homes
her mother is sick and she must bring money
on the other hand, she is quitting her job and leave us for good
to join her lover in the city, her last chance to be married at 36
these domestic help helping themselves
to be not like us, loners
consumed by the weariness of our flesh
for years and years the hours filled with emptiness
i can hear the sound of the clock ticking so slowly
like the fins of an old goldfish in the glass bowl
i bought for you on the day of our marriage

today we are left alone in the house
you keep yourself busy washing the dishes
drying the laundry in the yard figuring out that you may rush again
the next minute it will rain
the cloud darkens
i keep choosing my words, thinking the idea of this union
us for 24 years, just us, just us and nobody else
in the same house, the same furnitures unbroken feet
and unstained in the living room, where the same color of
drapes are changed almost on the same months, the same seasons

boredom, too much familiarity, the wear and tear of our gazes
i call you from the kitchen, asking you to give me a glass of cold water
and you complied like the woman who loves her man more than him
loving her

i have more words to choose, more ideas to think, to trap, to keep,
to smoothen and polish like a piece of wood sculpted to the form
of a woman's beautiful body

thank you i said, i thrive on cold water, all the days of my life,
i take in the water that slides on my throat
smooth like red rhum down to my soul, i could have asked you again
if i had the courage, i ask myself if my love is strong if this will survive
us, through the boring years that come and yet to come

i did not have the courage to ask, if
you still love me
with my balding head and wrinkling skin

i got colder, i am sure, it is the water, half of the ice in the glass
is completely melted.

poem by Ric S. Bastasa
Added by Poetry Lover
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