A Poem a Day (656): NaPoWriMo Day 25 - What is your idea of perfect happiness?

 
Day 25
 
Prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on the Proust Questionnaire, a set of questions drawn from Victorian-era parlour games and adapted by modern interviewers. You could choose to answer the whole questionnaire, and then write a poem based on your answers, answer just a few, or just write a poem that’s based on the questions. We have a fairly standard, 35-question version of the questionnaire. www.napowrimo.net
 
 
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
 
Too many empty gaps in the question,
not enough breaths of daylight
in an expanse of deep happenstance.
A trip-up. It was a trick question after all.
 
It needed a whole list of answers. And more
questions. It wasn’t just one thing.
But then she’d forgotten.
She lost her smile along the way.
 
He said she used to be fun when they met.
He asked what she was wearing; said she looked
like shit. All her friends were wrong for her,
he said. And her light had gone.
 
There were so many things she’d lost,
at some point, somewhere along the way.
 
Lost, and not refound. But maybe, just
maybe, she never needed those things.
He was no longer there, a heavy weight,
watching. He was an absence. A quiet.
 
Now she could dance if she wanted to,
anywhere in the house, even the shower,
abandon her clothes like an unkempt,
multicoloured body by the front door,
sleep with the cat and not feel him seethe
because an animal was getting more attention.
 
It seemed like another life, a dreamed-up existence,
a postcard bereft of a forwarding address.
 
Turning her mother’s fountain pen in her hand,
she gazed at the bright, young woman on the wall.
Posed against a mountain peak, she smiled,
smiled with that open innocence of youth.
 
‘Dear daughter,’ she wrote. ‘I just thought of you,
as the answer to a question I was asked today.’
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 25, 2024