Ah, career women

Busy as sexless worker bees they buzz,
Heads bent, hiding in their cages, rattling
Invisible chains of wage slavery,
Denying meaning to themselves, and love.
An hour to munch the crumbs and read a book,
They spend their sunrise running in the park
In regulation shoes and uniform,
The austere maidens of the master race!

A walk to work would yield them joy, actual
People along the way to talk with, and
The city like a symphony of singing.
Grant you they are bright but bright as sheen
Reflecting from a blacktop after rain
A shallowness of being, devoid of depth,
And merely sky of brooding clouds, and self
Deception, like a narcissist forever
Gazing on her face in disappointment.
So it is eternal beauties die
Alone and unremembered.

and they do this to me:

Does the veri vary in my sweaty palm,
as pencil rides the crest of dimpled meaning
scratching on a page of slight blue lines
my own mundane allotment beating time?
A dose of dousing in the myriad of words
is medicine to make one melancholy,
memory the long boat in a sea
of lonely mist arising out of sapphire
blue as perfect sunrise, bright and cold
like unforgiving iron to searching hands...


Was once a time when I was forced to count syllables but the 5 beat singsong comes so naturally to me now that I consider full abandonment of prose.