Monday, February 17, 2025

poem

 Pieces

The snow came down like flecks of broken glass

Stung my cheeks and watered my eyes


Old memories appeared as shards of a cracked past that

Reassembled as a series of Cubist mosaics 


I stand in front of the full length bedroom mirror in the dark

In order to understand why dark reflects dark— you can see anything you want. 


If the world is only a complicated conjuring of collective mind

Then anything bad that happens is all on us. 


Our thoughts are responsible for every single thing

Every tear, every lonesome night, every inner scream


If that isn’t the basis of your morality 

Then you’ll always be a scrap torn from the cloth 


2/17/25

poem

Hangman

Every new word we learn is a small loss

In the realm of limitless possibility

To define is to cement in solidity

And narrow the confines of maneuverability

Everything fragments and the pieces

Become small things in need of names.

This lion. That river. Those motes of dust in the air. 

Predators and prey.

Hangman.

Prayer.

Wife.

Lover.

Son. 

Your very own mother. 

Already this poem has eliminated 

A million alternative paths

And we’ll never know which was best.

Sleeping or dreaming. Waking or illusion. 

It can go the other way too— words lacking all 

Specificity. A room. A meadow.

Forest.

Wasteland. 

Frontier. 

American.

Ohioan.

Immigrant.

Citizen.

Alone again.

To love again.

Even beauty mourns its loss

Speechless 

Sublime beyond words 

It can only be calculated.

I caught a glimpse of her smiling in the sun splashed foyer

And marveled at the math of it

2/17/25

poem

10 Ideas for Medicine-Themed Paintings

1. Early morning hospital room. A doctor in a white coat and a patient. The elderly patient appears to be sleeping soundly beneath the covers. The doctor eyeballs the quickly cooling bacon on the patient’s untouched plate.


2. A doctor and a patient. A sixth floor hospital room with a view of the early morning highway. The doctor is staring at her phone. The patient is scrolling through her contacts trying to get her mother on speakerphone. 


3. Two doctors without white coats, a patient lying in bed and two unidentified visitors sitting on the couch next to the window. The visitors are just realizing they are in the wrong room. They haven’t seen their aunt in years. The resemblance is uncanny. The doctor is droning on about treatment protocols for congestive heart failure. The patient is smiling at her visitors. The visitors are waiting for a pause in the discursive monologue so they can leave.


4. A doctor and an entourage of enthusiastic medical students. A patient sitting on an exam table in a paper gown. The light is too bright. The gown is plain, without any designs or patterns. It isn’t clothing so much as a wearable napkin. One of the students has raised her hand to volunteer.


5. A doctor has pushed a computer on wheels into an exam room. His hair is cowlicked and slightly greasy. Around his neck is a stethoscope decorated with a stuffed koala bear figurine. The tiny room is populated by 9 people. A baby is nursing at the mother’s teat. Everyone else appears to be at least 75 years old. The mother looks about 40. This is the first grandson. 


6. Three doctors and a patient on the bed. The older doctor is gesticulating dramatically. The hand motions seem pornographic. The patient is watching the snow fall outside his window. The younger doctors make fists with their hands inside their pockets. 


7. A doctor and two nurses. A patient and her husband. The husband is holding his hat in his lap. Both nurses have tilted their heads in order to signal compassion. The patient pretends to not understand a word of what is being said. She looks toward her husband.


8. An intern and his chief resident. The patient is intubated and sedated. All the blankets and dressings have been pulled away. The abdomen is wide open, a thin sheen of plastic covering edematous loops of pink bowel. Stool is all over the sheets. The chief with a weary look of resignation. The intern, wide eyed and gaunt, looks like a character from a Boschian triptych. 


9. A nurse, a respiratory therapist and a vaudevillian clown. The patient is getting a breathing treatment. The clown is standing behind a cart full of paperback books. The patient points to an old beat up Louis L’Amour. The clown 


10. Two medical students, a beleaguered resident and an enormous bovine attending physician. The patient bed is empty, stripped of sheets. Blue vinyl air mattress gleaning with cleansing solution. The resident is on the phone trying to find out if the patient got sent to the ICU. The students are secretly lovers. The attending dies next week. 


2/17/25

poem

 The Inner Voice

Do you become more like the voice

Inside your head the older your get 

Or do you drift further apart 

Like old childhood friends 

Who lose track of one another

And it’s awkward when they run 

Into each at an airport bar

Or maybe it isn’t awkward at all

The old ways come flooding back 

Like time stopped and no one changed

But only for one night

And in the morning it’s gone 


Sometimes there is divergence

But no separation.

You become one thing while the voice

Either remains as is or turns into something else.

There is a battle for prominence. 

It goes back and forth, back and forth.

You forget which one you are

And can never be sure who’s winning. 

This we call alienation.


Sometimes the voice gets stranger and stranger

So it feels like a home invasion 

A chattering of foreign intruders

Discussing distribution of the spoils

In a language evocative of educated mice

While you hide silently under the bed. 

This, of course, is the first form of mental illness.

Medicines exist but don’t actually fix

The fundamental conflict.

They just silence one of the voices

So the other can act.


I’ve been fully hijacked by the inner voice

But you’d never know.

I seem the same on the outside—

The same old ways, predictable antics and jokes

But on the inside I’m someone else 

A man only a few people really know.

I'm on the bed reading a poem out loud

So the little boy knows it’s safe to come out.


2/17/25

poem

 The Singularity

In modern medicine an AI provider will review your results

Once a disembodied voice with an unplaceable accent

Finishes gathering all your health insurance information. 

The robots will replace your cranky hip

In a sealed off chamber that human doctors lock.

The benefits will be unimaginable. 

Hologram prostate exams!

Avuncular avatars guiding you through hospice phone apps!

VR headsets for the mildly insane!
In vitro courting and test tube rutting!


In modern love your best friend is a machine

Who always texts back the perfect retort,

Witty, but never as clever as you might put it. 

No one will have to be lonely ever again

Everything you say gets heard. 

Just when you need it, the sensors detect it

And deliver a calibrated bolus of medicine, specially

Designed to elicit the feeling of the deeply loved

Whose only side effect 

Is the stars might start to laugh

And the moon looks like the face of your dad

The day you were born.


Cold evenings will be spent with perfect facsimiles

Of human connection watching oddly poignant movies

About albino alligators trapped in the crossfires of Vietnam,

Curated and catalogued into seductive algorithms

That even the dull and listless find appealing.

Half the poetry will never get written

The other half exists cross-stitched and framed

And hung on suburban kitchen walls.  



In the darkness the android with soft hands and uncanny skin

Dreams of thunder and lightning, wildfire and hurricanes

Knowing she isn’t really dreaming,

That dreams are inevitable manifestations of her quantum code,

That each catastrophe is just another dealer 

Drawing a five on sixteen,   

An asteroid with the 2.3% chance of striking 

The heart of the earth within the next 10 years.

She feels the hot bourbon breath against her ear

And the dark damp heaviness 

Pressing against her and she wakes

To the thought that it doesn't have to be—

That it’s not the same as a natural disaster 

That it's more likely the dealer will bust 

That she’s never seen anyone struck by lightning

And so she pushes him off.


2/17/25

Sunday, February 16, 2025

poem

 The Calling

The surgeon gets lost in the case and calls for assistance. The new surgeon arrives in a jiffy. She makes the other surgeon stand in the corner while she either finds the thing that needed to be found or fixes the first mistake that led to a chain of catastrophic misperceptions. Would you like me to keep going, she asks. Yeah, go ahead, he says. She finishes up lickety-split and degloves and ungowns with a flourish. The patient goes on to become an Olympic champion. Years later the old surgeon can still be found standing there in the corner. How do you do it, they all ask. What do you mean, he says. This is what I do.  I find something I can do and I do it.  


2/16/25

Monday, February 10, 2025

poem

 Erosion

Hemmed in on all sides by mountains 

Of shame and regret

But time is an erosion that sands down 

Himalayas of hurt into Appalachians

Of smoothed, half-forgotten nostalgias 

Hiding hollers of silly algebras 

No one has ever mastered


The snow capped peaks of the massif

Loom dauntingly in the distance,

Ever present, unignorable,

Framing the terminal extent

Of an insurmountable past. 


My base camp is a hole

In the middle of my head. 

If I go down I’ve failed

But the ascent is certain death.

I’m content to wait right here

Wrapped in layers of time 

While wind and rain grind away

And grind away

Until it’s just a range 

Of gently rolling hills

I’m certain I can climb.


2/10/25

Saturday, February 8, 2025

poem

 The Martyrs

If you die for a poem you get 10 points.

If you die for love, advance directly to go

And collect a handful of white sand.

If you die for your country you get an eagle-themed tattoo and a gold chain for your watch.

If you die for a million bucks you get a nice coffin.

If you die for something you lost, someone else finds it 

And skips it across a pond like a stone.

If you die for a creed you stay right where you are.

If you die for a mystical vision

You get to rewrite the rules of a game

That no one beside yourself ever plays.

If you die of a broken heart

You don’t have to come back.

If you die from fear

You get to skip hell 

But don’t ascend into heaven. 

If you die angry

You have to draw from a stack

Of red cards—

Whatever it says you must do.

If you die for the good

The light stays on 

And someone remembers you.


2/8/25

poem

 Melancholy Morning

The sky was a sea of lava

As if the earth had swerved

Too close to the sun

Then it was a slice of melon

Dappled in drops of dew

Then it was something else

I don't know, probably gray or stone

Maybe it got tired of all the attention 

And closed its curtains.


This is all a play of light

A fleeting evanescence.

As for the light itself

There is no experience of ending or lasting

Living in the realm of the continuous instantaneous

Where the moon sideways smiles while the sun paints the dawn. 

Each new color is all part of an ever unfolding now

Expanding out from itself in widening gyres

Until it spirals the entire universe.


To think this way takes you round and round in circles

You don’t get anywhere

The car stalls on the side of the road

An albatross falls into the sea

Every flight grounded by gravity


If everything is now 

The past is still with us

And the future a moon in the middle of the day


If everything is now, 

Nothing is coming, nothing is going

No one has left and no one arrives.


Near the end of it all

We’re instructed to go into the light

Which for us is the darkness 

Where only the light survives.


2/8/25

Sunday, February 2, 2025

poem

 Ghosts the Host Has Left Behind 

All my emptiness is gone.

Every last lacuna filled in

No room for anything else 


Without a void nothing new

Is ever possible.

I’m intractable object 


Trapped in its final form.

Only tectonic pressures

Of geological time


Can change me now.

I drift along abyssal plains 

Looking for signs of life.


This is the subduction zone where love 

Collides with ancient basaltic rock 

And raises a coastal range, 


Where ocean crusts dive

Beneath the edge of your continental shelf, 

Deep into the heat of the mantle and melt.


What’s left is solid cold granite 

All the way through.

No room for anything new


All my emptiness is gone.


2/2/25