I couldn't help myself. I had to get Michael Stipe and a cool sketch by my friend Verena interwoven into this poem about the ravages of Altzheimer's Disease, a mental ilness of sorts that robs the late middle-aged and angry of the years they have left. Oh if they could only find cure....this poem is based on someone I once knew, my grandfathe....and yes, I am Heather.

Curly puppy-tails of smoke,
Are the parethases of age, That mark her "unavailable"

Her only lover, of sorts, is an elusive icon,
A testament to a once vibrant heart turned to oatmeal.

Sunlight glares a blinding shaft,
Revealing every crack and crevace,
Where powder, applied as though with a giant feather-duster,
Lies and accentuates her advancing years.

Amid scampering particles of dust,
Are strewn the remnants of a wasted life

Why had God dealt her such a dismal hand?

In her palace of cobweb and lace,
The diva waits, sucking on cigaretes,
And listening to her granddaughter's R.E.M. collection.

Ah if she could be young and supple, free of mental decay;
Not stamped with the scourge of Altzheimer's Disease.

Regressing back, the heavily-mascarraed diva
Picks up a photo of a young and nubile Micheal Stipe,
And grinned as her fuzzy mind recalled sketching him for Heather.<> It had made the teenager, ripe with youth and sanity,
Grab the bundles of bones, once her grandmother, and hug her tight.

Time has been her enemy; it stole what she never had.
She recalled a young Frank Sinatra, and how, at tweny-five,
She haltingly, brimming over with a creaseless face and a mile-wide smile,
She got his autograph, clasped it to a firm-bossomed chest,
And thought she would be young and dizzyingly infatuated forever...

.....now it is all gone.
For time and disease have been her enemies.
The stole her waif-like beauty, robbed vital grey cells from her brain,
And death, she sighs emptily as the sketch of Michael falls from withered hands,
Is now her only friend.

Jane Wanklin
1997.

Mental illness, as I have already shown on this page, is not solely the domain of the young. "The Diva", once a vivacious coquette in the 1940's, now sees herself mirrored in her granddaugher, Heather, with her teenage infatuatation with Michael Stipe.

This elderly soul, left only with memories scatttered, haphazardly all around her, waits with Heather and Michael, for the blessed end to come.