The world outside my realm is strange to me.
For venturing out of my boundaries
Is not what I can do so easily.

I give you my sincere apologies,
For I have fears you might not understand
What shuts me in from all adversaries.

It did not happen fast, it was not planned,
This was a thing that developed over time,
And is not contagious by holding hands.

I am in prison but not for a crime
My jail cell is more like the mental kind
Where there are no real walls for me to climb.

Shut in my house is where I am confined.

II

I do have contact with the world outside
Though family, the web and the TV
But that is not my world where I reside.

I do admit, with care, I can go see
The world outside, but in my mental state
I rush to get back to my home safely.

So outside my house I can not relate
To things, because I am not part of it.
I am an outsider because of fate.

My world is not too bad I will admit
And I am thankful for what I have too,
Because I could have given up and quit.

But I have family to see me through.

III

As you can maybe see, my shut in life
Revolves around my family the most
And I am mother as well as a wife.

So over years, I have become engrossed
With my small world, and not the world out there,
Where I decide if we have rice with roast.

My family is totally aware
Of my small problem and deal with it well
They help me when I am in some despair.

And when I take a step outside my shell
They give words with lots of encouragement
Which in the end it helps me to excel.

But for now in my world I am content.

With one more memory of the near end,
To come back to the lonely world I spend.

Now I have one more memory of a world that was about to end
Only to be brought back to the loneliness I spend

Some go past the point, where it is all in the mind,
That is what I did, but thanks to my son I am not dead.
For it was his voice I heard, from half way around the world,
I love you Mom, don’t leave Me., is all he said.

I can’t say I don’t like my life,
For that would be far from the truth.
But there is one thing that bothers me so
And that was the day, I lost all my teeth.

It would not have been that bad,
If during the whole span of last year,
I didn’t cry all the time, from my despair,
And I could have at least, worn some false teeth.

Other than trying to eat, then could not,
It greatly effected how I looked.
I suddenly transformed from young woman,
Into the old grandma without any teeth.

So I hid myself away, in my own little world.
That way no one could see how I looked.
My family tried to encourage me a times.
But I didn’t want even them to see, me with no teeth.

A traumatic and miserable year has gone by.
And I put my family through many kinds of hell,
For it’s was very hard for them to stay close,
When I turned inside myself, because of teeth.

I changed overnight, from a lady that smiled,
To a scared person that always covered her mouth.
I would cry if I saw how I looked in a mirror,
Cause I hated how I looked without teeth.

I lived though one of the worse years I have known,
As it had taken me a whole year to finally mend.
My family was strained, but it getting better again,
Now that I say with a smile, “I have teeth”.