dreams call on me rarely now

my visitors are mostly regrets

with gifts of grief and remorse

what conscience never forgets

 

the love I too often spurned

women I so routinely forsook

bad decisions or no decision

benefit from a backward look

 

yet the past is a willl o' the wisp

easy to install ideal outcomes

where everything's simpler, a

perfect tune hindsight strums

 

I bemoaned a luminous woman

for decades my self-hate I fed

then learned she'd been dying

when we met, and soon dead

 

I'd envisaged wondrous times

in my life she'd loom foremost

while the reality was different

my paramour was but a ghost