the harvest

In the darkness I lay
as I try to allow my mind
to escape into sleep
if just for a moment
as the chaos of disease unfolds.

The girl child rings;
my pager just another
squealing and vibrating apparatus
breaking the silence of the night
in this cathedral of suffering.

A harvest has occurred:
organs plucked like ripe fruit
from the human vine
as one life extinguishes in the night
another hopes for a few more breathes
of this acrid hospital air.

The ability to expire
has once again been decreed;
an irony as life
has already passed his last breath
through those verdant trees.

A question lingers on my mind
far from my tongue
as those with this healing power
appear to deny the reality
that death lives on in each
resurrected soul.

I ponder now
that when this structure falls,
when technology fails us,
and future civilizations examine
what transpires in these halls of healing,
will my life be
an abomination?

hail mary

The baby pictures
hanging in black and white
at your bedside,
seemingly miles away
as the symphonies of infusions
and respirations keep death at bay.

The sanguine seeping has stopped
if for a moment.
The sirens of the monitors have ceased,
giving your healers
some peace, and some time to contemplate,
the march of pulseless arrest.

Yet all I can feel,
is the continuous pounding
in the silence of my mind,
and the sensation of your body
beneath the weight of my hands.

I looked into your eyes
as I forced your breast
in reverse
to move the stagnant blood
once again.

I felt your arm brush my thigh
as it weightlessly fell towards earth
under the cantor of the compressions,
as I counted the beats in my head
hoping for a moment
that you were going to sit up
and ask me to stop.

Yet as I peered once again
into the vacant hollow of those orbs
I knew the beat must go on
and the code must continue.

Laying in the darkness now,
prayer comes, with sore muscles
and swollen joints,
Hail Mary,
that my hands
resting over your heart
moved mountains.

For as I peer
into the newborn face
in black and white,
I hope God heard my cries
and the beat of my hands
knocking on your heart
to say hello.

solace to the cavalry

Bring solace to the cavalry,
slow the hoof-beats,
labor his breathing
and turn the crimson of his blood cold.

Hands once strong
taming the beasts of sport,
the soldiers momentum
carried on the backs of phantom ponies.

I watch your life:
swollen and bloated
the skin's metamorphosis
evolving from mustard to eggplant.

Sergeant I cannot stop this!
What has begun when the crown
breached into the light of earth
yellow now in the presence of the son.

Go now with the young men
twisted and wrecked in the desert,
into the solace of the woods,
where your stallions bask.

Exhale and expire my dear soldier,
you have served well and strong,
for I would not be at you side
to help you dislocate from this acrid world
had you not made the ultimate sacrifice.

May solace come soldier,
when as death looms near
that comfort will infuse the heart on your son
who awaits your coming peace.

sterile field

Break me down
moment by moment,
shatter my piece of mind
dark lords of disease.

Mask another soul
within the white walls
of sterile health
and plastic wellness.

I have the tools
to breach your shell
of supple
water tight protection.

The hypodermic goddesses
dressed in verdant lavender tops;
winged harbingers of my
therapeutic deeds.

For only these deities of Hippocrates
wield my powerlessness
over the savage deeds
christening your bones
and raping your heart.

foreshortened future

A heart tattooed to your chest,
a mask to distract from the scars of disease and war,
to hide your human weakness
from the shadows of souls pacing the halls.

Your handshake was the only link
to the strength and resolve in your past
because your endless tirades merely unveiled
your overwhelming sadness.

My mind could never create such cinematic horror,
which exists within your intrusive thoughts each day.
I dream of a power to reach within the fabric
of your mind and extract each traumatic event.

As I sit and ponder,
how I would have fought to save you:
to return your breaths and heartbeats,
had I found you dancing from the rafters.

I thank your sadness yet again,
for giving me a glimpse into the reality
of your ongoing torment,
so that I might try to pull you
from the dark hell of your memory.

Because the solace that I find in sleep,
the wearily somnolence of night watch and residence,
destroys your mind each night
where you resume war
and relive the atrocities of your past.

to expire

Ask me O' Ishmael,
what I believe to be the failings
of our fair society.

I too see the amnesia of our anthropology
the inane belief that we are the owners
and operators of this great
world.

I am not the end of the line;
the finished product
of this evolutionary tale.

Far from it,
at least my mind hopes.

I am not the jelly fish,
captive to the sea
and a trite believer that the world
was created to meet my needs.

I am not the chosen one,
to feed from the omnipresent belly
of mother earth.

No, I am merely a Leaver,
trapt in captivity;
a fanciful spectacle
for the consuming masses of my generation.

I hope to merely
enlighten myself to the reality
that my fellow creatures of banal respiration
will all meet the same fetid end.

We will die:
some slowly, others painfully
yet, quicksilver to the cortex
is my lurid dream.

Fast and furious,
like a teenager to the breast
is how I pray it ends.

Yet, O' Ishamael,
my brother in agnostic dreams,
I will carry the torch
and teach all who will listen
of Cain and Abel,
and of the evolution of living beings.

southern discomfort

To the healers of my generation,
I write to you in desperation.

Look up for a single moment
and hear my simple words,
set down the potential scalpel
dry your hands of today's disease
and head my plea.

We are dying, slowly,
you and I.
Not the death of coronary disease
or pleuripotent oncology.
But the death of ignorance
and apolitical idiocracy.

Our country of great wealth
with its fantastic drive to technological healing
has forgotten our brothers and sisters
whose lives were destroyed at the hands
of mother nature.

The flooded south has not dried out,
the disease and death in the Big Easy has not ended,
and yet somehow we have been led to believe
that the great fight of this decade
should be waged with weapons and military might
rather than with our healing hands and minds.

Our brothers are falling into deaths grasp
at their own hands,
as despair and continuing hopelessness
suffocate an entire people.

We have blindly followed the media:
led like the pied piper's rats to the sewers
of misdirection and political spin,
away from the true domestic catastrophe of our nation.

We have been trained to bask in the
political glow of September
salivating like a Pavlovian hound
at the glowing box of political gruel.

Heed this suicide note,
bearing witness to the jaded reality
that we have been force fed for too long,
and take action to speak out to our fellow healers
about the travesty continuing
in this greatest nation of dictatorships.

I beg you my colleagues,
my intellectual connoisseurs of evidenced based living,
to turn your sights to the forgotten souls
in the South.