No casual strangers allowed

There she was, sitting beneath a decaying
Magnolia tree,
Whistling the lamentations of the discontented,  
Absent-mindedly flicking empty beer bottles into an arsenic pool,
Hiding her soul from the pestilent sun
And the bitter hope of yet another false dawn,
  
I knelt beside her beneath the poc-marked  
Black boughs.
And watched the ripples dying a painful death upon the stagnant water
So skillfully positioned by man's skeletal hand
  
  
I pleaded  
" This is no place for one so young who has the privilege of time dancing at their feet.
These dung hills, this poisoned land of wishful thinking and demented dreams  
It is only for lost causes, disappointed truth seekers and the battle-weary who fought the world,
Who spend their days taking obscure roads  
To pointless destinations.
You must return to paths narrow and straight,
Where bitter words shrivel and wither beneath the radiance of a fulsome moon."
  
She wants to speak, but I say,
"Please don't tell me your ills; my wisdom is  
As deep as that toxic pool.
There is no cure, no hidden medicine upon  
This parasitic breeze."
 
But she weeps,
"Why can't they leave me be to my rhyming  
And my poetry,  
I was obedient; you see believed all the lies
They told me they never realized they were reducing  
My life too office cubicle mediocrity  
And now they want more,  
Body beautiful is what they say, a perfect life with shiny white teeth,"
  
  
I sigh " the world is what the world is they  
Will never be satisfied "
  
I take her gently by the hand and lead her back
To the mist that poets and madmen cannot
Pass
 
I kiss her on the cheek and hand her a tattered copy of Yeats 'The land the Heart's  
desires '
I whisper, "your pasture will be greener  
Your sky the deepest blue, and you will bathe in crystal clear springs of the mind,  
Your soul is for you alone."
  
As she vanishes into a haze, I hope she is gone forever and never returns to this empty God-forsaken land.