Sleepless Wife Poem by Delilah Miller

So many things remind him of his ex,
every day,
his attention is completely conditional.
With all his glorious wounds, he rolls in salt,
like it is his ex girlfriend's sheets,
with a last note of pheromones in the cotton.
He wants to catch all the old passion in one just an armful.

He says I'm not one to talk;
I can't talk because I suffered.
Perhaps, I suffered because I didn't talk.
But I did not talk,
more than an explanation and a smirk,
a smile of the grandest indifference.
Now, the silence creeps in and out;
my words wash over him
with less and less significance

If he'd listen to me,
he might hear that the year that tore down my wall,
that exposed me to the dark untrustworthy world,
I got the best grades yet.
So write me off,
because it's hypocritical to survive.
Or burn the bed
because she burned it long ago.
She watched him sighing into a filmy pillow,
like I do now,
complacently playing the no-nonsense husband
ignoring his living, breathing sleepless wife.