Disengaged

Housekeeping
she now did online,
often sweeping clean the page
of those items which,
in the evolving course of things,
no longer fit the feng shui.
From real housekeeping she'd been
disempowered ... age 17.
While they shamed her for sneakers with skirt,
the contempt in their eyes
burned up family ties.
Thus dislocated, then stricken
with PTSD in the woods
(as the PTSD, itself, informed her,
in its details of manifestation,
when her consciousness later awakened to it
in its 20-something year of occurrence
as it occurred, once again,
beside a forest ...
herself twirling 'round, quick as a whip,
this way, then that --
for from behind which woodsy shrub or tree
would the maniacal frog-man leap?
She couldn't be quick enough
to apprehend him from any direction,
were he to pop up and strike.
To silence the battle,
she would have to go inside
and close the door.
How many times had she been defeated
by the presence of nearby forest
this way ... needing to go inside
and close the door
to silence the physical, but not visual,
flashback
to an event now blocked
from her inner sight?)
Altered within,
she could no longer memorize
any song on the piano,
nor take charge of her household landscape,
for nothing in it -- including her family --
was hers,
anymore.