Today is brewing, steeping.
Clouds blur within my head.
Grass pricks feet like shards
or linoleum with eyes.
They’re supposed to be on faces.
And that song, Tiny Bubble, goes with a ukulele.
It’s yesterday again, or Tuesday tomorrow.
I shall pad to the upstairs water closet.
Run ocean waves until steam rises like fog
and drains clog with long dulcimer hairs.
I will slip under the sea
to become an anemone.
No one can miss me.
Because i have not been here
for a long long time.
They were left behind
like empty carts in a now empty parking lot.
Once touched, then guided by sure hands
doing for others, sometimes in steady sun,
or picking up the pace in life affirming rain.
They weathered storms until they could not.
And now they sit, in that mawkish pool of wet,
that sickening smell of decay.
They sit in a place where no one comes,
drowning in their memories.
Photo by Janet Webb. Written for the incomparable Rochelle Wisoff-Fields Friday Fictioneers where we’re asked today, to respond to Ms. Wolf’s photo in 100 words or less. Word Count: 71. Rochelle: please excuse the free verse rather than fiction today!
We didn’t notice at first. She’d misplace keys. Or forget to call.
Once the diagnosis came, I used to take her in the back yard with a coloring book and a box of sixty-four crayons emptied into a bowl. She used the crayons gaily. To color and for digging in the dirt. Always the brightest colors. Lines were immaterial. She colored with sheer exhuberance.
Slowly, the colors changed. Two-fisted brown sharp edged lines filled page after page. And then I found her, staring straight ahead. Coloring book upon a rock, no sign of her upon its pages. And I knew.
Flash Fiction (100 words) written for Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers. Photo prompt from Kent Bonham. For a recent poem I’ve written on the subject, read Dementia.
Memory spiders twirling thoughts.
Nurse-white whisper shoes
sidle by. Clocks in freezer
stopped time when I knew me.
Thawed too fast, so they came
in loud tapping shoes.
And we danced ourselves into lucidity,
spotlight shining bright.
I remember tomorrow
like it was yesterday.
Quadrile 1 for dVerse Pub for Poets. Word count 44, using a form of the word dance – as in dance into a condition.
lillian the home poet 