I am stuck in an elevator with Cher, Tina Turner, Bette Midler,
Pink, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga when
Liza Minnelli drops in from a tiny opening in the roof.
We all scream “LIZA!” and then we whip out our instruments.
To be fair, I do not have one to whip out, but I find a spoon in my purse
And a lid to a small sauce pan.
Please do not ask.
This would add to my embarrassment.
They start saying “how about this one?” until Pink wins.
We sing her songs. All of them. They stop playing in the third set.
“Who is clapping off rhythm?” It boils down to me.
The elevator roof trap door opens and Willie Nelson arrives.
He and I agree we are on rhythm
And all the rest of them are wrong.
Best elevator ride ever!
I am stuck in an elevator with Cher, Tina Turner, Bette Midler,
Pink, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga when
Liza Minnelli drops in from a tiny opening in the roof.
We all scream “LIZA!” and then we whip out our instruments.
To be fair, I do not have one to whip out, but I find a spoon in my purse
And a lid to a small sauce pan.
Please do not ask.
This would add to my embarrassment.
They start saying “how about this one?” until Pink wins.
We sing her songs - all of them, but stop playing in the third set.
“Who is clapping off rhythm?” It boils down to me.
The elevator roof trap door opens and Willie Nelson arrives.
He and I agree we are on rhythm
All the rest of them are off rhythm.
Someone reaches to dial the emergency phone,
but I bite off their hand.
He remembers their first time, in the evening chill
near to the cornfield behind the house on the hill.
Where the old folks live who are lost behind its door
and don’t know where, or who they are any more.
He visits her most days, she often doesn’t know who he is
at the house on the hill, where she now needs to live.
Sometimes she looks at him with a certain look in her eye
and he knows that look and he tries hard not to cry.
He wonders if somewhere behind those troubled eyes
the woman he loved so much somehow still survives.
And just occasionally in a moment of lucid thought
she remembers the times when her life was less fraught.
The time they were young lovers, passionate and free
and so happy to be married in the spring of fifty three.
The children they raised and all their cute little ways
and the sounds of Sinatra and Minnelli, on the airwaves.
He sits in his chair gazing through the window each night
up to the house on the hill, until the last moment of light.
Wondering if she looks down at the place she called home
and if she really knows he still lives there, all alone.