Under the Impression
Dementia
The old woman was unconscious when they carted her away,
her spirit kicking and screaming in the nightmare fog.
The birds wheeled and squawked helplessly
missing mince mixed through oatmeal and cubes of cheese
at twilight.
The weeds began to choke an always tended garden,
the vines no longer an arbour, a choking thicket
of rotting once-sweet grapes still falling onto clover
now cradles of voracious caterpillars.
The charade of a man's shoes
overlaid: a hotbed of cobwebs.
The papers are thrown out unexamined
as the rooms wait for yet unknowable changes,
footsteps of strangers.
She wakes in a bed not her own
asks only if she has become a burden.
Hours now tedious drag, broken by a glut of sleep
she seems to recall
there might have been meaning in it once.
her spirit kicking and screaming in the nightmare fog.
The birds wheeled and squawked helplessly
missing mince mixed through oatmeal and cubes of cheese
at twilight.
The weeds began to choke an always tended garden,
the vines no longer an arbour, a choking thicket
of rotting once-sweet grapes still falling onto clover
now cradles of voracious caterpillars.
The charade of a man's shoes
overlaid: a hotbed of cobwebs.
The papers are thrown out unexamined
as the rooms wait for yet unknowable changes,
footsteps of strangers.
She wakes in a bed not her own
asks only if she has become a burden.
Hours now tedious drag, broken by a glut of sleep
she seems to recall
there might have been meaning in it once.