the neglected

how it came to be this way,
s/he just can’t believe---
as the cliché goes,
“it seems like just yesterday”
that they had been rolling,
bouncing,
drilling in the hay &
yet,
s/he wasn’t spared what others
told him/her would be
the
inevitable---
for soon, interest in the rolling,
the bouncing & the
drilling
to the heights of that once
compassionate bond
between the two of them,
on the part of
her/his still significant
other,
faded &
dissipated away,
to the point where
the suggestion of separate
rooms was made,
for “it really is easier to
sleep in a bed alone,
honey,” s/he
was told quickly.

increasingly embarrassed as
the days go by, to have to
walk that long hallway in order
to knock on the door of
her/his past-lover who is now
simply a housemate,
to ask for the scraps of intimacy
that may be left,
that might be allotted to him/her
before it has all washed away
entirely,
s/he starts to change her/his look,
s/he gets a different hairstyle &
s/he starts to become receptive
to those around him/her that
might want more than a chat
by the fax machine or a stroll
outside the facility after
lunch---
where it will go, where it
can go, nobody knows,
but one can believe that s/he
feels guilty, because
that good ol’ christian upbringing
has instilled in him/her
a complex, which hid his/her own
sexuality
for so many years &
now it spreads inside
like the most rampant of cancers,
beating against the walls inside
her/his brain, that s/he must
be devoted,
that s/he must do what s/he must
in order to keep a
“happy” home,
that s/he must deny her/his own
body,
that s/he mustn’t indulge during
the
only
life
that
s/he
has &
so, just around the bend is not only
the end of a “relationship,”
but also the end of
a “faith,”
one that should have been dead
long ago &
the neglected lover,
the neglected believer,
will no longer be neglected.
once s/he puts her/his foot down &
walks away from it all.