poem

Gross Anatomy

The first day of gross lab

I unzipped the canvas drape

And there was my own pale face,

Those vacant lifeless eyes.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. 

After all it was my own choice

To donate this body to science.

It’s right there on my license.

And so I went about the unseemly business;

I cut myself by my own hand,

Opened this shell for all to see.

Who ever learned anything 

Without a little self harm?

It sounds so awful but 

No one sounded the alarm.

This is all on the up and up.  

I’m here to help

I’m here to educate,

Myself, most of all.

This is the day I finally get to look inside.

I thought I knew this body so well

But it’s easy to get lost,

Easy to lose your orientation

Being in the places 

that have never felt the light.

(Shocking the number of times I had to reference the guide)

You have to label everything so you don’t forget,

Like blazing a trail

Though a forbidden wood.

Little red tipped pins plunged into:

Ulnar nerve

Accessory spleen

Inferior epigastric vein

Recurrent laryngeal

Corona mortis

Popliteal

Everything gets a name.  

Dissection is slow and laborious.

So many structures to identify and weigh 

Everything except for the heart

Which I’m afraid to touch

Fragile, fearful it will fall apart.

At least I can see it now

in its grayed stillness

while it pounds away invisible

inside my own living chest.

At the end of the hour

Everything returns to the hollows.

White sheet pulled over my head

My gutted corpse basted

in a shallow pool of formalin.

We latch the metal coffin

and turn all the lights off.
The time was not wasted but

I’ve seen enough

of this view from the land of the dead.

Self autopsy is usually a one time event. 

Giving yourself is a totality:

You can't hold anything back.

All the things you think you’ve hidden

always in the end get found;

a good anatomist knows his way around.

By the end of a dissection

the damaged, the broken, the aberrant 

used up form we leave 

is no longer ours to hide.

It belongs to the living instead.

9/20/19

sunday poem

Sisyphus

“To decide whether life is worth living is the fundamental question of philosophy”

-Albert Camus

Camus knew how to question

The nagging vexations.

He never found an answer.

The best he could do was a method;

Pushing massive boulders

Up and down a steep hill

Day after day until the end.

Sweating, straining under the weight,

Somehow still smiling,

Grinning at the absurdity of his fate.

You can close your eyes

and imagine him happy.

Or peak a bit when no one is looking
And wish the boulder would just stay put

I too embrace the absurd:

Another night on call

Every other weekend

Days and times blurred.

Another gangrenous gallbladder

Busted up appendix

Perforated bowel

Air under the diaphragm

Air tracking through the perineum

The wounds that ooze

Frantic next of kin phone calls

Chuggering wheeze behind a curtain

While on the other side

An out of town niece weeps.

Try to go home but 

The ER is calling again.

The doors never close,

Sickness never sleeps
Blah blah on and on until the end

The living all die, just you wait.

That one you save 

Gets a lovely obituary soon enough.

The stones always roll back down.

But I have no time for boulders.

My weariness precludes the effort.

Awareness of the absurd is not nearly enough.

This is second derivative shit.

I need to be aware of the absurdity

Of my chosen form of distraction.

And that's it.

I carry an old newspaper clipping of 

a young boy’s death

smashed by a car one fine day.

We had tried to save him.

Cut open his little chest.
Feathery pink lungs spilled out

But he died right there in the trauma bay.

There’s nothing ever here.

Good and good and so what.

And so I keep a small 

rounded pebble in my shoe;

formless, blunted, no blood is drawn.

A modest ache, at most,

a dull nuisance,

a query lodged against my sole.

When are you coming back home?

They don’t understand.

There is too much work to be done.

I can't lie down.

I carry this rounded stone

as a gnawing reminder

of the final absurdity.

How could I ever forget?

It’s too late to escape

this particular fate.

So dumb, stone in a shoe.

It throws off my gait

Makes my back ache.
But it works.

And this is the life I choose.

Running away is not an option;

The faster you run

The deeper the stone digs.

The very bone gets bruised.

9/15/19

Poem

Good Boy

I was always a good boy.

I did what I was told

Finished my work

Got those grades

Kept my head down

And I wasn’t too bold,

didn’t make a scene.

“Don't waste that brain,

Don’t make me ashamed”

Hush

Sit down

Roll over

Fetch me that stick

Good boy.

That’s a good boy.

But I eventually got around

to becoming a man

and I made a few scenes

and wasted a bit of my brain

and lived for lengths of shame.

I swirled around the drain

but somehow bobbed to the surface

like flotsam after the storm.

Now I have a little one of my own.

He doesn’t listen to what I say,

thinks he'll figure it out all alone.

He wants to make his own way.

Everyone says, “He’s just like you”.

Just like me.

Someday he’ll see.

For he’s a good boy too.

9/9/19

Poem sunday

Storm Coming

I heard something like
A stray dog's low growl

And went outside to check.

There she was---8 feet up---- in a wretched tree

Wedged between a cachectic trunk 

And a crooked scurvied limb.

Hey what’s with that look on your face?

I’ve seen that look before:

The bills are late.

Dad didn’t hear a word you said.

The lovely girl across the bar

Chatting up another guy.

Passed over at work,

Picked last, too short,

Passing another whole day unseen,

Passing the next unable to hide 

The things you want to keep inside.

The feeling the world won’t simply unfurl

Anymore from within but simply hurtles

Forward,clacking and whistling, runaway train

From somewhere around the bend.

But the tracks seem overgrown with weeds--

How can this be? as the whistles scream

And the lights bear down;

You’re frozen in time and place,

A deer spooked halfway across the interstate.

Hey little girl, don't scowl like that.

Hey now, sweet girl, you're still only ten….

She says the boy she likes

Has a crush on her own best friend

And there’s that low rumble again,

Of a train somewhere around the bend.

Or maybe it's a far away thunder.

Those clouds are clumping up gray.

You'd best come down from the fray;

Trees are a bad place to get caught

When the lightning decides to strike.

8/30/19