My Nightly Visitation

I am sick and tired of your regular visitations.
Here you are again, the guilt - ghost that I left decades ago.
Surely you should have evaporated by now -
together with your pleading and faked overdoses.

But your face - a concertina of recriminations -
materialises, rebounding on my conscience.
You are eternally twanging your tune of
desperation and dependence -
trying to give you and I a different ending.

You are probably married now,
with umpteen cocky, cracked kids.
All stroppy and swaggering -
and you never give a thought - puff to me.

So why does your eerie ectoplasm -
your impossible imp - fiend,
bound on my bed, stamp on my head
every single bloody night?

I clobber, I claw, you still creep onto my pillow.
I battle my way up to breathe,
crank open my eyes to be comforted by his profile.
Is it really him lying there, not you?

Oh God I must check. I bury my face in his neck -
take incessant inhalations of his smell, - trying to exorcise
the subconscious scent of you. But your spiteful spirit hovers
in the ether, waiting for sleep to overtake me again.

You are my vile - vengeful spectre. The phantom at my feast.
The ghoulish apparition that opens up my poisonous past.

I need someone that can capture your essence
and bottle you up. You can become my jilted genie.
And I can watch over you - knowing you can no longer
intrude into my brain. You will be sealed right to my end.

In another time perhaps someone will dust you off, squint at the label
marked by the dried out ink of my yesteryears, seeing a
faint scribble that gives a clue to its contents.
A haunted love.