Sonnet Sunday

I've had a desperately busy week. But I've managed to pull a sonnet out of the hat this evening. The term "sweetiewife" is of Scottish origin, meaning an endlessly chattering woman:

My Friend, Marie

My friend, Marie, no longer needs her life.
She had it once, and though she never died,
she let things slip, until the downward slide
became unstoppable. It seems a knife
had sliced her from her past – the sweetiewife,
the bubbly girl, the smiling baby – tied
together, then torn apart, a divide
wide as heaven and hell, as peace and strife.

“She’s got no life,” they say. She shrugs, moves on.
She cracks her crystal balls, burns tarot cards.
She starts in Zion, walks to Babylon.
She sells religion, science, waves placards
against it all. She screams through sex by phone.
She eats and shits. It’s life she disregards.