Trigger warning. This poem is confessional. I had an affair with my friends wife and got her pregnant.

The Sacrifice We Never Made

The name appears.
She never calls here.
My nerves quake and blood crawls
to a halt. Something is wrong.
I'm going to be asked
to make a sacrifice.

"I'm pregnant."
I somehow knew what she was going to say
or feared that the most at least.
I lost my house since I lost my job
and had to move in
with the girlfriend
I don't love.

I spend the occasional secret evening with you
to enjoy your gorgeous company,
but mostly to get laid.
You submit to my wants
to meet your needs:
spending money, attention and bills paid.

You never loved me when I look back.
It was just mutually convenient and arranged.
You had your own broke loser deadbeat.
I had my lousy in bed girlfriend
who was truly quite deranged.
You made a sacrifice

in order to make ends meet.
Now you say someone's come between us.
A love child;
bred of desire, but not of love.
Now we discuss the one between us' need
to make a sacrifice

for our separate miserable
and temporary love lives
and to retain the "quality" of life
from which we barely dangle still.
The Doc gave a pill
which dropped like a sacrificial dagger

into her belly.
She bleeds you out
sick and in pain.
She sends a text.
I'm the only one who can
comfort her shame

as she silently becomes
the alter of your demise.
Her lover asleep
on the other side of a locked bathroom door.
The bathroom floor your death bed.
The sewer your tomb.

My own lover asleep next to me
in our farce of a bedroom.
I don't reply as it would wake her for sure.
You'll never know us,
but we would have loved you so pure.
Your would-have-been ma and me

would have been good
together if only had we
had more to offer than we did
or indeed were willing to. You
made the sacrifice we weren't willing to
of love and life.