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The Viper
There once was a time when I imagined I was strong;
For love I could endure all things...I was wrong.
Those were the days before the empty ache;
Before my heart began to shatter and break.
I truly loved and cared for the one who was my wife;
I believed we would be together, throughout our life.
Ever so slowly she chipped and chiseled my love away;
A sliver here, a chunk there...it lessened day by day.
Oh, my family tried to warn me, my love she did not return.
Yet I was stubborn and persistent, for my love inside did burn.
I thought if I only offered more, poured out my heart to her,
She would grow to love me...and the days began to blur.
My faults and flaws I showed her, opening my inner soul.
She smiled and stabbed me, with eyes of burning coal.
I told her all my weaknesses, that she might know her mate.
From these things she fashioned weapons, forged by bitter hate.
It took the deaths of those closest to me, before my sight cleared.
Father, brother, sister, friend, from my life were sheared.
Ripped and torn, bleeding within, I turned to my wife for aid.
If I lived a thousand lives, a graver mistake could not be made.
"My father is dying," I told her, in a voice ragged and torn.
She replied, "Oh, we're all dying, from the moment we are born."
"My best friend is hurting badly, can he stay with us awhile?"
"Not while I'm living here," her voice dripped with bile.
"My mother is ill, and so lonely without my father"
"Let her find somewhere else to live, we don't need the bother"
On and on it went, a constant, never ending thread;
Her family was important and mattered, mine were better dead.
Hurt beyond words, betrayed by one I trusted most;
An old, bitter story, of which there are a host.
I was hardly the first among men to take a viper for a wife.
At least I finally awakened, before the ending of MY life.
The Viper
