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David Angel's avatar

Study in Gratitude

David Angel

Soaring, grateful, waving hi

From my balloon up in the sky

A power trestle floated by

Sadly, now I'm waving bye

Flipped around high tension wires

The whole contraption caught on fire

Unlike birds, I cannot fly

My etude, practicing to die

My wife will need a lawyer

My car will need a buyer

I hear an angel singing flat

Hope she won't be in the choir

Copyright ©️ 2024, David Angel, All Rights Reserved

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Margaret Ann Silver's avatar

Rage in middle age

.

I’m listening to a book on perimenopause.

It’s good. I’m nodding along, mental notes

all that stuff. But I can’t listen to it for very long

without getting so angry that I feel like my face

is a red balloon about to pop. Why is this topic

still kept in the dark like a closet skeleton

the thing we cannot say and cannot name

until it hits each of us like a freight train?

.

I gave birth to six incandescent beings

whom I am told all the time

are each made of stardust.

But now that I have provided the world

with a constellation of children

why does the buck stop

right at the doorstep of middle age?

.

Am I going to flounder from here on out

in a maze with no ball of string, and a minotaur

around every corner, drowning in my own dry fire

pursued by invisible bugs biting my skin

haunted by thoughts that I haven’t done enough

each month until I give up?

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