The Slough of Despond

I loved you once, I love you still, Odile,
and so I sing my passion, still unspent,
where others – Yeats, the Brontes, Eugene O’Neil –
half-mastered, leaving life, where e’er they went.
I turn my face toward my bedroom wall,
which beckons me to one last confrontation
with everyone I know in deathly pall,
denying me one last live conversation.
I welcome smells that leave a personal stench,
now burrow darkly down in my duvet.
Forgive me, please, my clumsy schoolboy French,
but here I go, before my end, to say,
             "Alors! Au revoir, adieu, a tout le monde!"
              I revel in my depths, the slough of deep despond.