Three Poems

Medical Literary Messenger
(Online) November 2024

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Waiting Room (A Haibun)

In the waiting room, he finds himself among twelve phoneheads and only two booksters: one’s a Biblist and the other is clearly an ancient Beatnik reading some Ferlinghetti. If he were home, he’d be enjoying his solitude. He’d be inhaling some sandalwood incense and maybe allowing a little Susumu Yokota to lift and float him away to a more perfect world. But he’s not home. He’s in a waiting room, waiting. He knows that when the door opens and they call his name he’ll be moving into another world altogether. He can only hope that it will be a more perfect world. Or: he could just go home and be there.

The Waiting Room Blues

overhead speakers silent

time at a standstill

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Early Release Likely

Saturation Level
Heart Rate
Pressure
everything on the board
has an asterisk
Same old story:
doze for an hour
wake up stunned,
pounding, breathless;
ready to explode
He might go home
(one way or another)
tomorrow
or maybe
today’s tomorrow.

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Departure’s Early Arrival

After his sixth day
listening to beepers
tangled in wires
plugged into monitors and
injected and injected again
and again and again
his seventh day dawned.
He closed his eyes
and it occurred to him:
it was only Tuesday,
not his usual day of rest.

Misplaced Adoration

 50-Word Stories (Online)  July 2024

The sun sits pretty and
all of its well-tanned followers
look up and smile, say ahhhh,
and stretch themselves out
on the low-tide sands or on
Grandma’s hand-made picnic quilt
in the high-noon high-grass pasture,
basking and happy.
                               But everybody
knows this: All the really cool people
worship the moon.

From Hopewell To Halifax

 

PoetryBreakfast (Online) April 2024 

I have strolled on the seafloor
at the Bay of Fundy, wandered  
among The Hopewell Rocks, 
occasionally flattening myself 
into their low-tide crevices 
like an ancient sailor’s skeleton 
watching the tides come and go 
to strip and bury the shoreline. 

And I’ve seen their murky furrows 
vanish and reappear and 
vanish and reappear again 
so many times  
I’ve come to believe that 
nothing ever vanishes, 
that all things vanished  
always reappear and  
always reappear again, 
always the same 
but different. 

But today, instead  
(but somehow again)  
I’m hundreds of miles away 
and it’s bumper to bumper
in downtown Halifax, 
and I’m waiting behind the bus 
on University Avenue, 
waiting for the light to change, 
for the pedestrians to crosswalk,  
for the bus to move 
in and out of traffic 
like the Bay of Fundy tides 
always coming and going, 
creating a tidal flow of humanity 
appearing and reappearing 
but always the same 
the same.