Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt:  Oasis – A sanctuary is a place you can escape to, to catch your breath and remember who you are. Write about the place you go to when everything is a bit too much.

Notes from a Hammock

You’re born, you learn, you travel, marry.
You work and breed and dodge and parry.
From stage to stage, you rarely tarry.
All the burdens that you carry?
Some fall away and some you bury
in your mind or in the mortuary.
The Easter Bunny or Toothless Fairy
are lost to minds that have grown wary,
that know that life gets sort of scary;
and so from Maine to Tucumcari,
when life decisions become hairy,
start to pine for sanctuary.

Life has put us through our paces
as we walked her walk and ran her races,
scored all the goals, rounded the bases.
Squeezed by her molds, strapped by her laces,
we show her marks on legs and faces.
Our backs are curved, bent by her braces.
We yearn to live on another basis,
opting for life’s finer graces—
sort out the jokers from the aces.
Old dreams fade and leave scant traces
as we grab our passports and suitcases
to seek our personal oases.

We have a facelift, buy a yacht,
thinking happiness may be bought,
but soon discover that it’s not
found within the course we’ve sought.
With indecision our lives are fraught.
We always wish for where we’re not
as we rush from dot-to-dot
leaving everything we’ve got—
those things and issues for which we’ve fought—
to live new lives but find we’re caught
in the net of how we have been taught,
regretting what the past has wrought.

Now that I’ve found my Shangri-La—
that place where I relax my jaw
and learn to live by another law,
when petty grievances start to gnaw
and worry me with their thrusting maw,
scraping my mind until it’s raw
and I find it sticking in my craw
to just let go, a breath I draw
and release it in a long soft  “Ahhhhhh.”
When the world reaches out with unsheathed claw,
my sanctuary is to think “Bah,”
climb in the hammock, and just say, “Hah!”