The Year We Spoke Less.

Extracts from The Familiarity

Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing poems from my manuscript ‘The Familiarity’. This collection is a work in progress and I am currently weighing up self-publishing or identifying a publisher, or agent.

The Familiarity
The Familiarity is a poetic meditation on the evolving landscape of long-term love—its quiet devastations, its unnoticed beauty, and the way intimacy can both sustain and suffocate. It explores how marriages can move from the thrilling beginning to the transactional middle, where perhaps we forget who we both were, and have become.

The poems pose the questions, is there anything greater than falling in love with the same person twice? But to get there, how much do you have to fall out of love?

The Year We Spoke Less.

She lay there in off-colored sheets,
looking off-colored.
For the sixth time this hour,
she told me her bones ached.
Said her cells
were moving
like molecular molasses.

And there I was—
alive with words,
as if the gods had anointed me,
full of newfound meaning.
After a recession of years,
poetry was dripping
from these very fingertips.

I turned to my wife,
proclaiming,
"I have found the golden thread.
The escape hatch to a new world."

She let out a sigh—
one long sigh—
as if her whole body were deflating,
emptying itself in slow motion.
It went on forever.
Or maybe five seconds.
Hard to tell.

Then she sat up.
“I’m putting the kids to sleep,” she said,
and disappeared down the hall.

I lay there,
left with the remnants
of this so-called marriage,
pondering our quiet dilemmas,
wondering how
we get through these moments.

The next day,
I found her meditating
with dowsing rods she bought
from an advert on social media
while I was still holding out
for divine intervention.

In the evenings,
she sets the air conditioning to seventy.
I can’t sleep
when it’s over sixty-seven.

What chance did we
really ever have?

---