What is to be done

The curtains have gone, has the show begun, or just ended?
Staring into the mirror and asking if you had met before, so hard to understand, I can’t describe the reflection once it leaves me and it changes every once in a while, everything seems farther away no matter what.
A search for ladybirds means that there will be none to populate my hands, an aimless stroll and there will be tickles down my neck.
Where have they all gone, I did not seem to find them anymore.
Catch them to set them free, why, because it makes me happy.
Nocturnalized, adapted to avoid the dreamy clasp, the name of the Game.
In the name of self-care, but they have villainized selfishness.
On hotter nights, a head sprouted out of the window drawn by the flashlight of a night-shift employee, joins the solemn dance that echoes the stars.
We have taken something and made it into something else and this may never stop. I knew because it came to my head.
No fussy, self-absorbed flower bed to catch me, only wild, sturdy sprouts, it was a question of preference.
Preference meant alternatives.
But they have all gone!
Present although I could not reach them, does it matter that they were there, not so much.
If only I understood the ladybird’s cries, were they saying those words that I must have skimmed before, “only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us…”
What does it mean anyway, he writes and I had been thinking of something else.
In lieu of a solution, an elaboration of a bunch of things that have been labelled an issue.
A slow build and I fought to care where it was heading.

Artwork by Joan Mitchell, "Ladybug" 1957.