bad news

Holding your hand,
resting my grip on your shoulder,
looking into your anticipating eyes,
speaking in soft tones,
only minimally alleviates
my inner suffering
as I convey the diagnosis
you have been dreading to hear.

You always ask
about time,
as if by some measure
of temporal information
will make what I have just said
any more painful and agonizing.

Nothing I say, can prepare you
for the desolation that lays ahead,
but I promise that as much as I can
I will be your guide,
your pilot down this river,
of your disease.

I will attempt
to steer this vessel
through the calm shallows now,
and the treacherous swells
to come,
yet I can only be a guide
I am afraid,
for only you can bear
the weight of your disease,
as mortality stares down
from above your bed,
cloaked in a tired white coat.

libido

The feeling has returned
that stench in the depths,
the lower cortical function
that drives yearning and lust.

A mind soaked
in feral desire.
A pestilence
has infested
every synaptic transmission.

I have regressed
to reflexes of suckle and root,
perseverating on the return
to the aromatic origin,
of my limbic poison.

odd couple

I walked with you again today
hand in hand
down the sterile hallway,
as you slowly shuffle
your way through this maze.

You squeeze my hand
a signal I slowly learned
was how I could gauge your mood,
since it had been years since
you have said a coherent word.

The nurses watch this odd couple,
the frail and the young
the patient and the physician
pace these hallways
day after day.

I learn with time
the subtle reality
that no medicine
in my vast armamentarium
will quell your agitation
as much as the subtle act
of holding out my hand
and taking a walk
down these hallways
once again.

east and west

for W.H. Auden

A fallen comrade
passes into the dark night,
one moment standing at your bedside
holding your hand
as our digits intertwine
the warmth passing between
our skin.

The next:
your skin growing pale
the ashen fetor slips between your
dermis and subcutaneous tissues,
the funeral blues,
as you pass
ever so quietly
into eternal sleep.

You are taken
from your love;
their are no planes passing overhead
painting messages unto the sky,
for the only sound
is the respirator
switching to the off position.

Their are no stars
to extinguish in the night,
only cardiac monitors
and pulse oximeters
to disconnect
allowing silence,
in finality,
in your time of death.

the rose city

Seeing you again,
slinking through your streets,
sun soaked
and under the cover of summers darkness.

You are my lady covered in sweat,
the funk, the stench of my years
between these hallowed shores.

How dare you change around me,
without me.

Forcing me to explore you again,
to trace the path
of the evolution of my youth
under your new skin.

I want to embed these streets,
into my soul.
Roll in your grime and grit,
and tattoo this earth,
permanently,
deep into my dermis.

family meeting

Down the hall
in room fifteen
she lays in the darkness;
the tentacles of polyvinyl tubing
infusing sustenance
and filtering toxins.

I stand in your doorway
this morning making my rounds
as dawn breaks in the distance.
You know not of the new day
birthing force
as it seems your belly
would hope to do with its roundness
of the sun basking light
into this glass chamber.

Viral wrath has claimed your heart
as its own possession
and has stolen your intricate
defenses
against the dark art of microbes and
infectious agents; harbingers of your end.

Yet we will not let that pass,
as a mother agonizes over the
passing of another child into the night.

We speak yet again
of "multi-system organ failure"
the words passing as discourse
and conversation,
when in reality they are merely
cloaks with which we wrap ourselves
to shield our souls from speaking truth:
"I am sorry ma'am,
your granddaughter is dying,
their is nothing more that we can do."

The nurses pace about bearing
the weight of this burden daily,
some shield it beneath their loving care
and others project their disgust at dying
upon the young doctors
weighing the balance
and attempting to stem the tide.

lillie

Looking to the floor
the bleakness in your eyes
as you speak of a life
in your dreams.

A family, a husband
a house to clean
and a dinner to cook;
a man to wait on hand and foot.

You speak in rapid religious outbursts
shifting from one rapid thought
to the next
as reality fluctuates.

Tears now as you
spill the pain of the life
you never had the chance of living
because of your mental illness.

Your mind broken,
damaged by the torrent of thoughts
years of untreated illness
and moments of chemical bliss.

A verdict handed down from on high
as if despite your unwavering faith
the spirit was taken
from you child.

shaking hands

My back to the door
as I exhale the heartache;
the words of childhood beatings,
a drunken fathers pain continues into today.

I cannot help but stare
as you speak of sadness, the hollow in your soul,
at the fresh wounds on your wrists
the dried blood still clinging as a foreign reminder
of your attempt to escape into the night.

I wonder how your wife
would have heard the news of your
suicide
had you not stopped at the superficial dermis
and allowed the scissors to work true to fashion
into those pulsating vessels beneath your weathered hands.

The air now acrid
an admixture of tears and days old scotch
breathed into the daylight
of a hospital morning.

Your hands tell the depth of your story
not the wounds on the surface
but the grime worn into the keratinous layers
wringing with each word of "manhood" and "death."

Your hand-shake a firm grasp
conveys respect, anger, frustration
and your pain buried in the torments of youth
at the hands of a father,
and the resilience of time.