14. Despair

With long blond hair
and eyes of blue,
bluer yet after tears,
Lady Dysphoria nagged
and clawed the psyche.
Wounded with welts
scarred deep and sore
from life’s daily battle,
no medical aid seemed possible
without true diagnosis
and truer expertise,
well beyond Freud.


It was not so difficult to believe the severe bouts of depression over the years, nor the heavy dependence on alcohol. They were, as if possessed by a spirit, who in retrospect might be named Lady Dysphoria. In later years, an avuncular doctor remarked happily that it all, that is the periodic bouts of desolation, finally made sense to him. He had wondered over many years where it, what seemed an existential sorrow, had come from.
They had even experienced an unhelpful course of psychoanalysis.