wrathful

Assume the fetal position
sullen under the starched sheets
hiding from your mind
as it betrays your sight.

Blood pours forth
spilling urine
discarded to the porcelain
goddesses of these hallways.

You speak only of death today
perseverating on time;
driving home the point
in incoherent diatribes.

Beads of sweat accumulate
on your brow
the only sign of the fever
boiling within your mind.

Lucidity comes in small blasts
verbal ejaculations
of coherent thought
only momentary and without context
making the diagnosis difficult.

The surgeons and psychiatrists
now at odds and wits ends
about the future
of a malignant diagnosis.

Slowly the tincture
crawls into the recesses
of a diseased brain
giving freedom to speech.

I now hold the fluid
of your backbone
sealed in sterile plastic
and bless holy
the waters of your mind.

Pray with me now
over a cup of warm
chocolate milk
on the strength
and resolve of your
cellular interdigitations
keeping viral wrath at bay.

the dictum of duty

I was once told
that my mind was a "gift"
not to be wasted
on the banalities of modernity.

I was honored
as a young man
to soar to new sights
an eagle above boys;
an enigma in this age.

I dreamed of a day
when cast in a cloak
of white cloth
healing powers
would transcend
through my touch.

Yet, now as a son
of the alpha and the omega
a foot soldier
amidst marines,
I toil in hallways
under the shadow of "time."

I once calculated the anion gaps,
the alveolar-arterial gradients,
and corrected calciums,
of patients and people,
with a hope to heal.

Now my elementary arithmetic,
is spent adding 24 + 6,
subtracting one day in 7
equaling a total of hours (80);
in the hopes of not violating
the dictum of "duty."

Merely a distraction,
from the true reality
of the broken system
of fractured care,
within the sanitary wards
coined "modern medicine."

suffering

May I ask you brother,
soldier of foreign wars:
a battle now raging
in the catacombs of your marrow,
if you suffer,
as you lay at my feet
cloaked in white linens?

I inquire
about your pain
as a measure in digits
of your suffering,
as if that integer
can convey your daily agony.

I attempt not to stare
at the sinew of your tendons
tearing forth through your forearms,
to peel my eyes from the image
of your emaciated breast,
as ribs thrust forth
asking heaven to grab hold
like the handle of a bucket
and carry you home.

Thankfully today
the must of falling rain cloaks
my nasal passages
from the odor of dying;
because yes doctor,
their are things in this hell on earth
that are far worse than death.

Behold the agony before me,
the cognoscente dying man!

In the past I could take solace,
in seeing the dying escape into delirium
that wondrous somnolent confusion
as death marches near,
yet today my friend,
as you speak,
it is painfully evident that your mind,
has fought away the waxing and waining sleep,
of peaceful passage.

Take a tincture of relief,
so that I may be relieved of my own suffering,
as you lay dying under my care;
drink of this cup and sleep,
if for a moment beyond the horror of nausea,
and a step ahead of suffering,
for I know this will not last.

As I leave your living tomb,
and break into the sterile hall
once again,
I breath again of that rain scented air
and thank the Lord,
as I scrub and scour
your suffering
from my hands.

four-thousand souls

Piece by piece my brother,
the children have fallen
to the ground;
searing the earth with their blood and bile.

Does your nose grasp that odor?
The fetid chemical aroma
of cutaneous cautery
at the hands of a suicidal man.

Tears shed by mothers and fathers
to absolve their son's
of their heavenly wickedness.

Do you realize that one day
everyone you know will die?
Memories of your time
on this swirling ball of gas
and organic existence
will for eternity be erased.

isolation

Missing you again
tonight
counting the minutes to midnight
that transition of days
when our bodies can meet again
between the warmth of cotton sheets.

You do not know
that most of my nights,
during fits of insomnia
I breath you in,
slowly,
in an attempt to intoxicate myself
back into the forbidden realm of sleep.

abbreviation

I stand in front of your door,
once again,
in the sterile hallway
burdened by the knowledge
of your disease.

I hold in my mind
the malignant meaning of your mortality;
the very thought of which rots my soul,
quickens my pulse, and sours my bowels.

Sleeping there, oblivious
to the verbal damage I will convey
of the inanimate death
cursing through your veins.

The three letters that I utter
at your bedside:
a word once a whisper in darkness
now an atomic blast articulated in loquacious detail.

I am the minion of the reaper
cloaked in white
a facsimile of a healer
for I bring disease to your heart
with my forked tongue of diagnosis.

I speak the alphabetic characters
mortal men have assigned to Beelzebub
in a Biblical attempt
to obliterate the trinity.

My visage in this moment
seared
into your hippocampal files:
a horrid image
napalmed into your myocardium
for eternity.

Please forgive me brother,
in name and spirit,
for bequeathing unto you
the scarlet letters of my generation.

memoriam

So much to say

my friend…

Of what you have taught me,

in this life,

and what I will carry beyond your days.

You will always be B-I-G, BIG,

larger then life,

my friend,

in heart, in family, and especially in friendship.

You raised two fine sons

brothers to the end.

Men now in life

and now a grand-father to be!

You garnered my respect

not because of your size,

But because every man who met you

felt in your presence a warmth and love

which you emanated.

You took a couple of skinny white boys

taught them to be better fishermen;

Skilled them with a rifle and a square-knot,

led them into the wild

by foot and by sea.

Please know

that you inspired me to be a stronger man

pushed me beyond myself

and were a model of what it meant to be a father, husband, and friend.

I will think of you always,

when I set foot on a trailhead,

when I cast my line into the depths of lakes and seas,

when I fix my gaze on a target in the distance,

and when I attempt to heal one of your brethren of war;

You will be with me.

Thank you for

being BIG,

for helping this tenderfoot, this cub,

become an Eagle,

for helping this boy

become a man, a husband,

and a healer.

God now knows your warmth.

Knows your smile and the comfort

drawn from your spoken word.

And, for this, I am thankful.

It was my honor to have known you!

To carry you on in my heart and mind,

to have learned from your wisdom and experience.

For this, I am blessed!

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.

blur

The world moves
round my eyes
between the squint
of heavy lids.

I awaken again
on this dark night
staring into the bleak
acrid haze.

Hoping of mearly
a dream to return to
somewhere between art
and pornography.

under the microscope

Read my life
the story in front of you
on paper
in letters
the transciption of the past.

Make a decision
about fate and future
based on a flacid question
and hollow inquisition.

True passion
for healing
the psychic
and the somatic
cannot be seen in just my words
and my letters.

But in the sanguine
stream slithering
from my lips
to my soul.

amnesia

In my psyche
that rotten hollow
within my soul
beyond her grasp
the torrent lies in wait.

Ask me once my dear
if you can see
the horror hidden
behind these orbs of deception.

Ask me again:
the words falling
from your lips
as digits upon the piano's keys
and I will deceive
my own beating heart.

I see them
carry in our dead,
the son's and fathers
of my generation
of war.

Yet my core shivers
at the many wounded
and dead
of mind
who will fill our offices
in need of some pharmacologic
elixir
of amnesia.

Our dead may forget
the pain and sadness,
yet our healers will
remember
all that ails and
aches in their minds
for eternity.

aphasia

A vault of space
occupied by the amorphous solid
of thought
and movement.

A single instant:
a subtle rupture
or absence
of flow.

The droop
of lips and lids;
a metamorphosis
in your space.

Locked now
with frustration
and misunderstanding
in your loquacious world.

A wasting hemisphere
of hallowed thoughts
lost now
in space.

morning rounds

Each morning
I travel the long white hall
to the corner room
where you sleep.

Each morning
I disturb your subtle moment
of peace
with my clinical barrage.

Each morning
I pray as I walk that hall
as I take that final step into your room
that a different face will greet me.

Each morning
I hope that life has returned
to your smile
and that my medicine has healed.

Yet, each morning
my heart breaks
as I gather my clinical data
at your bedside
and you sleep again until tomorrow
morning.

the pastors son

I fear each day at your bedside
that when I look into the brown of your eyes
I will only see death;
the flicker of life
will have somehow left you
beyond the control of prayer or passion.