Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs

Disappointment for Nothing


Night after night I wait for you to try to connect with me emotionally
and I am left like a child abandoned in the night.   
I hear you excited to talk about you. 
I hear about what’s going on at work. 
 
You rail against the government. 
You tell me all the routes I could take home from work. 
You try to fix the latest sermon I’m working on.  

You don’t try to touch my heart,
just strike my ears with so many words.

Is it a desperate desire
to fill up the growing chasm between us? 
I ask if you’re anxious.
“No,” you reply.

Disabused of the only reason
I could find for all the small talk between us,
I grow silent. 

I stew in disappointment yet again 
that there is no human contact,
just information being tossed about 
like that issued from talking heads on TV
that exchange news reports
of so many dying in distant lands
and pontificating about this and that of no real consequence

while a marriage, heart cut out,
slides dying, unnoticed, beneath our feet
as the broadcast goes on.

I send up yet another flare
by writing yet another poem
evidently just for the record now 
that will be taken and stored along with all the others
in the far recesses of some warehouse
until, years later, it is discarded with all the other worthless trash
as you’re left wondering 
what happened to make us so miserable.

Let me tell you:
It was nothing.

What I long to hear is some indication
that you even see me,
that you care I’m starving for what never comes
or perhaps (dare I dream?) that you’re glad I’m here with you now
sacrificing my time for you
and your career that keeps killing mine
though I wonder why I am here
with years of such disappointment
having turned into silent smoldering rage
that I love you so much
I now almost disdain you

for nothing.


                                      © 2007 Tess  Lockhart. All rights reserved.
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