Having just spent 7 hours in the ER with my father (after a fall, which fortunately did not end up with broken bones or bleeds), I am "worn slap out" as my Granny used to say.
No musings on the ER at the moment, but maybe it will arrive another night.
Now, to bed.
3/23/26
His family hangs
On
Every
Breath
Refraining from taking
Too much in.
Oxygen, Nitrogen
Carbon dioxide
Molecules heavy with meaning;
Molecules worth their weight
In gold.
I hold the weight
In my gut
A never-ending
Sucker punch-
Inhalation halted
The life force
Expelled
Can I not give mine
To him?
Brain burning-
Mechanical breaths
A metronome -
Counting time
He may not have.
8/1/25
I don’t know who I am or where I’m going
or what I’m good at.
I don’t know if this was some crazy dream
that moved into a nightmare.
I don’t know what may happen next, which
thrills me as much as it frightens me.
I just don’t know.
I don’t know how words morph into
these weighty scenes that lead us backward
and forward like the ebb and flow of oceans.
I don’t know how the body machines
and sputters along or how it somehow
stops - all at once or bit-by-bit.
I don’t know these mysteries. I don’t
even know what I don’t know – the
hazy mirror reflecting only what I can see.
I don’t know how love is born or takes
flight across days, decades, distances.
I don’t know how those we need most
simply appear silently at our time of despair.
I don’t know how danger is averted
on a darkening road in the half-wilderness.
So much – a universe worth – of un-knowing.
So fragile. So naïve.
And in this equation – so innocent.
But innocent how? I don’t know.
October 13, 2015
The seconds tick
tiny bombs
desecrating images of me
I worshipped.
Strong, fit, invincible
Yet here I am
in this chair-again
another hour
another round done
They say
I’ve rounded a corner.
I feel
I’ve been rounded up.
My tiny cells
exploding
with “therapy.”
A confabulation of a recent trip to a chemotherapy infusion center and hearing a man and his son saying that they were “doing the rounds” with the man’s doctors on a particular day.
(Image by Jon Tyson via https://unsplash.com/images/things/clock)
“There isn’t much air
left for her
on this earth.”
The dust will soon
be dust
again
Awaiting reanimation
like my heart,
my life
A reincarnation
that is never
what it was
And while her
metamorphosis
sends her to flight
Mine is the seed -
dirt poured
on my head
A baptism
of grief
and darkness.
A husband said the opening words during a Palliative Care consultation. Much was left unsaid, but it seemed the rest might have been implied.
Image from http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/image/2767
Photo credit here. Eastern Angel Blow upon this sea Thick with reeds And re-create Dry land from Water’s depth So all of us Living in capt...
