He has my pension,
sitting somewhere it no longer remembers me.
He has my property,
brick and paper converted into silence.
He has my investments,
years folded neatly into his pocket,
creased beyond recognition.
He owes me the remnants of a vast loan—
vast when it was mine,
residual now it is his.
He owes me four years’ salary,
four winters of restraint,
four summers of “next quarter”.
He took my business,
and with it the simple dignity
of earning my own living.
He does not speak to me.
Silence has become his chief operating system.
I do not know what he is doing to our business—
I still call it ours
out of habit,
or grief.
He will not reveal the revenue,
despite the healthy turnover,
despite the noise it makes when mentioned to others.
He will not let me see the books.
They are balanced, he says,
like a glass placed just out of reach.
He refuses to meet his commitments,
but meets his reflections daily
without discomfort.
He loses focus each time he draws breath,
as if attention itself
is an intolerable cost.
He thinks I am scary.
He thinks I am angry.
His imagination does the heavy lifting now,
running ahead of facts,
inventing menace where questions live.
He accuses me of disrespect,
of lacking faith—
faith, he says,
without evidence.
But faith is not required
when the truth is present.
Faith is a substitute,
not a virtue.
Respect has room for secrets—
for privacy, for timing, for restraint—
but it has no shelter for lies.
And somewhere between the numbers
I am not allowed to see
and the answers I am not allowed to ask,
my life waits
like an unpaid invoice,
long overdue,
still polite enough
not to shout.
Verbal Alchemy 