Wednesday the tired wrung-out day the lightest of rains falling and sometime last night the kid ended up coding went back to the Unit and this morning my head aches my dispo brittle in so many ways of course there’s no such thing as silence on this floor it is a living place it groans with life and at its leaving rattles like the IV pole of a patient making his rounds all morning long […]
What becomes ischemic when long denied hope? Deferral and deferral how long must it go on for living tissue about thirty minutes before it’s irreversible and reperfusion though vital just adds injury on insult and this hurts unless it’s good and dead and then you better cut it out quick but just how the hell would you debride a soul? Or determine the margins of what’s left if anything
And then they returned those birds to stratify the sky to incise with wings their variable trajectories and sometimes a sign is actually a sign like when one letter burnt out so that the neon spelled a name once spoken still known if barely but no I’ve heard that song before it seems if anything that hope precludes action and a chance sighting on the street is only routine entropy hokum really even today I […]
There’s gradients of silence– the moment just before the PA system comes on, the moment just before the voice calls a code, the moment after . And every voice there ever was started as a child’s voice . Is that why we’re so eager to rush, to save? Or is it salvation by action, by lack of thought? . After a while you can tell apart each wing of this hospital by the timbre of […]
Untethered untethered a psych ward day no one was there even as they sat there lost like reception a radio song cuts in and out and it’s not the same song that they hear anyway so I move politely on or try even my shadow self-conscious here they are not a ghost but it feels like a void here like an ache from a sharp blow like static no pieces no whole just cracks and […]
You must feel so grateful when you get home– You’d think, the way I talk big, putting out fires. But really, I mostly sift through the ashes of what once was, in front of those who knew it far better. Any comparison would be unkind, and superstition would say, unwise, but to think that way would cheapen things. As if any of us really stood a chance– all that to say when I get home […]
I am starting to understand this need for jargon, how to hold on to our humanity we simplify others’ noting agonal breathing not drowning on dry land. Kindness? You could argue it either way, and what’s the point? I just noticed you can see the whole stadium from the parking lot, a clear view of green serene lanes of turf– that’ll be nice come summer.
[DNR/DNI] It rained tonight, really rained, for the first time this year– I wonder if you were still around to see it. On the floor it’s always endings or the beginning of ends and there’s two ways you can go out that door and I’d call either of them leaving.
[The day] The gray rooms are not large enough to hold all that they contain, the precedents of admits, the recycled air and soft TV voices from other sides of curtains. And on the psych floor, small slots of afterlifes, another day, then another day, then another day, or sometimes not.
The note said NOTE: this patient is deceased. Not a surprise, except again for how fast things happen, and how that fastness is exaggerated by stasis before, and I swear time is not entirely linear, more like swimming in a river, with depth and width and current to account for, running dry or out to the ocean where all water comes from, into breath then into air– it’s a cycle, it’s conserved, and this midday rain is […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 