Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

Gone Baby Gone

The tulips are gone.
White, red, and yellow blooms
are no more.
Someone came and snipped them off,
took them home for themselves,
didn’t care who they were stealing from.
It’s like that now.
Beauty is coveted.
This morning it is cold and grey.
Down the street I hear the children playing,
screaming as they run
from swing to swing.
This morning I am scared.
The antibiotics have made me feel tired,
worn out and weak.
I see how easy it is to disappear.
One minute you’re running on a playground
happy to be out of diapers,
the next,
you’re back in diapers,
sitting on a rocker,
trying to remember your name.
I guess that’s why people have mid-life crises.
They buy a fast car because they can’t run fast anymore
and they want to feel like they are still moving.
They want to feel like they have escaped death.
They dye their hair or get a young girlfriend
and pretend that some of her youth will rub off on them.
They are scared that everything
they’ve done in the last forty years has added up to nothing.
They are scared that they’ve followed the wrong path,
married the wrong person,
studied law
when they should have studied medicine,
gone left
when they should have gone right,
bought
when they should have sold.
They see their parents decaying before them
like overripe fruit,
getting soft and wrinkled and losing their potency.
They fear that that is their future too.
So they buy that Porsche,
and rev it hard,
and tell themselves
they are o.k.
But they aren’t.
None of us are.