What the heck, I might as well. This is a poem I wrote about my "Dorothy."
MidLife in Kansas
The reek could not be erased
no matter how hard
Dorothy tried.
The smell of old dreams and unmade beds,
stale and musty, and oppressive
like the Kansas heat.
The old house was so horribly
in disrepair.
Baked and blasted by years of neglect,
it stood devoid of color.
Gray and mute,
a tombstone in a flat Kansas graveyard.
Some days only the dust seemed
to have life.
It hovered around her,
sometimes almost unseen,
other times it hung so thick and suffocating
that breathing itself
became another chore.
At night
in the stillness and the dark
Dorothy dreamed
of OZ.
Oh yes, long before the storm
Dorothy knew of OZ.
In the musings of a traveling man
she had seen such far away places.
And she sang of them.
And dreamed of a wizard.
It was Dorothy in the end
who called down the storm, bent it
to her wishes.
To destroy the house.
To splinter all of the old.
And carry her off
to OZ.
Where all things are possible.
And scarecrows dance,
and even the horses are in color.
Where she is adored
by munchkins.
Back in Kansas,
amid the debris,
only Auntie Em knew the truth of the storm.
And she thought of OZ
and remembered how the road to Hell
was paved
with yellow bricks.
