Smiles Familiar

Call it what you will - an affliction or an awful
affectation deeply sore ingrained – no reason
why, no explanation for behaviour satisfies.
Rules are changed. Dare you ask my feelings!
To imply decides your tenure and your fate
– with menarche now forty years of late.

Is it right to say the change was like disease
that eats within? No symptoms recognised as
surface signs; a trifle pained when questions
pry for reasons not explained. “I changed my
mind” is offered up appeasing real concerns,
revealing – not concealing seething tides.

Is this the bride I wed and bedded famously
for years you say? She looked the same, had
answered me with passion equally inflamed.
Today she’s rarely there where now a stranger
peers with jaundiced eyes that criticise. Dare
I say the word ‘absurd’ illogically applies?

Whichever way I try to make amends for what
I did, or thus did not – I’m on a losing team.
The woman of my youthful dreams is lost and
in her place a new identity. Though strange I
see that strangeness is effaced when smiles
familiar range across my ageing lover’s face.
© 14 July 2008, I. D. Carswell