Systemic Septic Depression
Ask her a question,
seek the knowledge of her ills and pain.
Take the first steps down the healing path.
Yet, when she reveals
the depth of her loss
and the void created in death,
you bypass her heart,
appealing instead to her visible scars,
and the alchemy on the differential:
Insomnia,
loss of the will to see into the future,
absence of the feeling of life;
“the spark that burned in my heart, it (he) has died Doctor,
please give me a tincture and potion to absolve death and cure despair.”
Answer her pleas O’ great master of the healing arts!
The loss now is yours,
the medical mind keen to the symptoms,
yet your hands merely treat the epidermal wounds;
local anesthetic, apply salve of wavering sympathy,
sterile gauze, wait for the tears to dry and the emotion to clot.
Could you be that fearful of your own mortality?
Is that the excuse?
Doctor, you missed the mark,
the saline tears spoke the true illness,
burdened below the “pain in my back and shortness of breath.”
Your script will never heal her,
she is gone now to the septic death – depression –systemic.
~j. allen
