Middle age, our heroine –
she made it! she’s here!
but it’s nothing like they said,
and everything like she feared.

Eternally hip
to the tilt of this dive,
a snap of the wrist
bests vodkas
one through five.
Disaster, a-courting,
adieu, a-bidding;
they say lately she’s been sleeping
on a bed of lettuce,
summing up her existence
with a Ghostbusters bumper sticker.

The home fires’ve weakened;
now she’s
running on empty,
running to escape
bend-over-backwards burdens
and sentimental don’t-be-lates.
Within herself, the fight,
she concedes, takes flight,
pries meaning from the dead,
deep blues from the red;
so swift, her escape,
through the soul’s
rusted hatch.

Little by little,
cracks emerge.
crack.crack.cracking.

Falling from space,
falling into grace,
three steps ahead
of herself,
it’s
so sharp, her mind’s eye
(eye of the storm)
(eye for fashion),
so sharp
she ought’ be able
to cut the crap.

Scratching around
lush plains,
in hopeless tune with everything.
A jogger, she spots,
out there, in
the twinkling distance;
life, she thinks:
a steady lurch
up a slow incline.

“Oh, cremate these mental barriers!”
she begs.
“I am, in all honesty,
too old for loneliness.
Can’t diagnose
a mystery,
can’t dissect
the impossible...”
but for all her understanding
she remains
an arm’s length away
from such torrid wordplay.

Her scream, full of
desire and
frustration;
she does the devil’s dance,
lingers
beneath beehives,
wanting,
waiting,
willing
the sting of inspiration.

Then,
like a sneeze that comes
at inopportune moments:
hope,
a feeling too
-
--
fleeting
--
-
to grasp.
Unanchored,
unafraid,
suddenly she’s aware
of all the beautiful sights
she missed from prison:

The trees, their consistent stance!
The shifting grass,
an evergreen hillock!
Dandelion overgrowth,
seen, but never unwelcome!
From the
undefinable blue yonder,
the wagtail
debuts
his latest song.

She is reminded
never to doubt such things.

It – her drive,
lands,
a nervous fly;
no telling how long!
The factors, elusive!
She conspires,
against her greater self,
to commit feeling to memory,
thought to paper;
to march and beat the doldrums,
creep
through the claustrophobic woods:
the mind,
restless, uneased.

This time,
the weather:
wild, and
everything helpless to it.