Rage in middle age sometimes means mixed metaphors

and, okay, a couple similes. Also, is that the correct usage of "whom" in the fourth stanza?!?

Picture by my youngest son.

Yet another poem prompted by

Lisa Jensen

! Her full post and beautiful poem on gratitude is here, and here is the prompt if you also want to try it:

If you’d like a prompt to play with today, I invite you to do a little scan over the past week or two of your life. Make a list of emotions you recall feeling. Now choose one. If you want a challenge, choose the one that seems the most difficult to convey or adequately express.

Whatever emotion or feeling you’ve chosen, take a moment to recall it. Can you invite it back into your body for a breath or two? Let it be there without left-brain analysis. Just feel it. Taste it. Notice its texture. What is it like to feel _______ ? How can you tell that you’re feeling ______ ?

Now imagine that you are tasked with capturing what this feeling feels like via an image—a sight, a sound, a smell, etc. If many images come to mind, great, make a whole list! If no images come to mind, great, you probably opted for the challenge of picking an emotion that’s hard to convey. Be patient. Step away from this prompt for a bit, then come back again. Remember the feeling again. Find it in your body again.

Does it have a color? Does it make a sound? What kitchen tool, utensil, or appliance most closely resembles it? What child’s toy is its nearest kin? If it had a profession, what would it be and how would it dress and what might it eat for lunch? Would this feeling grow in your garden? At the bottom of the ocean? Somewhere in Death Valley? Or are you more likely to find it packaged in plastic in a Walmart shopping cart?

---

I’m listening to a book on menopause.
It’s good. I’m nodding along, taking notes.
But I can’t listen to it for very long

without feeling like a pink balloon 
about to burst, fury inflating my face. 
Why is this topic still kept in the dark 

a skeleton shoved behind winter coats
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 are each made of stardust. 
But now that I have provided the world 

with a constellation of shimmering children
why does the medical buck stop
right at the doorstep of middle age?

Am I going to flounder from here on out
in a soot-stained maze with no ball of string
a minotaur curled around every corner

drowning in my own dry fire
haunted by thoughts that I haven’t done enough
each month until I gasp and give up?