What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

“What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

What ever happened to Baby Jane?
the shattered echo of a stage‑handed grin,
her silver‑haired laughter curdled into a
weird lullaby that sounded less like applause
and more like a lull for the dying.

Old‑world drapes hang heavy in a flat that grew thinner—
the walls, once bright with applause, now absorb whispers,
as though the house itself, a tired grand‑parent,
holds a record of her frolicsfold in its creaking bones.

Blanche, her twin, a mirror left behind in her memory,
dusted her pearls with tears, twisted in the same moth‑black
coax‑down of ambition, her light grew dim and far‑away.
The stage of their senior years left them both ill‑fitted,
but in the kitchen where tea‑sips turn to silence,
they perform a drama under a coffin‑silk curtain.

The child‑like hope of that July, the Violet rose that bleached,
the speckled scrabble of her old passport that read “American”,
now robs her path of a gentle climax.
In every scar of cosmery’s glare and the vinyl of their folly,
Baby Jane, once nimble on a spotlight, now crouches,
sits in a chair that no longer sways: the seat of grief.

— So what is left? The phone that rings the night, the
rough-sunned photo that hangs sagging—no stranger in a dream,
just a stale echo of waves that once sang in earnest.
She is the museum of cluttered memory, the lullaby of
the dog‑a‑shrink and deed of a house and a twin in one.

What ever happened to Baby Jane? The whispered truth—
a fleeting somnolent line written in the colour of an evening;
she docked her star on the coast of time and a mournful
behaviour that only the afternoon glass of an old, bright dawn could reveal.