mrs wooley’s end
Mrs Wooley’s song was madness.
This small distraught
attractive woman
with her fine drawn face and fluttering smile
and her unwashed hair,
bare footed and shivering in her unironed cotton,
spending her nameless days here alone in a neurotic industry of wakeful panic
and sleeping in fear of the ferocious nightime awakenings.
How they feasted in her dark rooms.
Everything is unfinished here
in this place
nothing is right.
Her dinner still not heated at daybreak,
her medicine not taken.
Which one ?
Which bottle?
A door not closed,
a visitor come by ?
Forgotten.
The carpeted hallway of her apartment covered in a confusion of everything her orphaned hands had discarded
or dropped
or put down
or lost in plain sight,
and the small rooms were littered with what had been emptied from the drawers and cupboards in her panicked search
for something
unfinished, not found,
and the crumpled bed where she did lay herself at night.
Her pencilled letters she thrust at us
for friends far away.
She showed us a fire blackened saucepan
and her bewildered brown eyes searched ours
for some meaning to her torrents of distress.
Why ?
The last time this gentle suffering soul smiled at me
and told me she would be fine,
and she patted me away to her door.
I kissed her cheek and left.
She died a month later
alone, face down, dead
amongst her litter.
deus exsisto misericordaliter
~
header pic by rick harris
petebowes.com 
Loneliness est ultimate paupertas…