There was nothing stable about you.
You were flickering images and flames and emotions.
You were like an old, black and white movie,
the pain in you so obvious it looked fake though so genuine.
You were the rustle of old tapes and the raspy sound
of Kate Smith's "Old Sad Eyes" on the phonograph.
But when you collapsed it was real, no Katharine Hepburn
or Myrna Loy or even Marilyn Monroe,
because you weren't an old movie or an old song
or an actress from the forties or fifties,
but a sad soul who could weave her own pain into her being,
making it look like less to us,
like a play by Shakespeare and
when the movie stopped playing on the drive-in theater's big screen,
we all held our breaths,
hoping for your face again but to the dismay of so many,
the tape had turned to sand beneath our feet.
