FYI: I enabled commenting without a log-in.
You're welcome.

Dr. E's Last Stand

The doc turned out to be a bent-over antique of a man with a tidy moustache and pungent aftershave.

Dr. E was about eighty.

I asked if he needed to see a chiropractor because, I swear, his torso was bent at 45 degrees as he shuffled around.

But man, was he cool.

He had that wisdom bred from keen intelligence piled with decades of human experience.

“Back in my real life,” he told me, “I was a cardiologist. I never intended to retire.”

He left it hanging there for me to draw my own conclusion that a man bent at a 45 degree angle wasn’t fit to perform cardio-thoracic surgery for obvious reasons.

He said he’d fallen off a roof fourteen years ago, and his vertebrae from the middle of his back downward were fused together.

No chiropractic work would fix that.

But undaunted by this crippling tragedy, he found a place for himself assessing the general health of patients sent to this little psych hospital.

You didn’t just show up and check in, you had to be admitted. So that was Dr. E’s place now. He worked in the middle of the night in the middle of the week at M---, assessing the craziness of all manner of crazies.

I liked him, liked talking to him. He spoke about “the dark ages when they piped in sunlight” to the lecture halls when he was in med-school. We may have exchanged a comment about Gunsmoke; his moustache was reminiscent of Doc Adams, but his bald head was all Montgomery Burns.

He asked questions to determine the status of my vision, hearing, and olfactory senses:  “Keep your eyes on this.” He moved his pen around my face, back and forth, left and right, up and down. “Can you hear me?” he whispered. “Can you smell my aftershave?”

He asked if I knew who I am and where I was.

“My name is—“

“You don’t have to prove it to me,” he smiled. “Just say yes or no.”

He didn’t hit my knee with a hammer to check my reflexes, but he took out his hearing aids from both ears to put his stethoscope there instead. It was electronic, to amplify the sound, I guessed, to compensate for his poor hearing.

I watched him turn the dial at the joint where the ear thingies were held to the cold thingie.

His face was earnest and wizened as he listened to my heart. I could tell he took hearts seriously. He listened like he was experiencing an echo of Mozart himself at a piano.

That wet thud sploosh of muscle squeezing blood was his music-- his drug, even.

He’d dedicated years of study and a lifetime of experience to this organ that he could no longer touch, no longer hear with his own ears. He had to settle for brief, electronically enhanced refrains of that golden time, in between asking lunatics if they could smell him.

Poor old Dr. E.

I felt so much more comfortable talking to him than I felt the next morning with the psychiatrist.

Liza and Troy

Icy fingers easily find their wet way down the backs of our necks and proceed to reach further in attempt to claw their way under nice, warm flesh. Every shiver reminds me of the way Liza's breath against my ear trips a tremulous thrill along my spine, and I concentrate harder on matching her skipping pace, holding this morning’s Sun Times over her head, since we had ignored its forecast for rain, anyway.

Liza laughs when she tries to leap a puddle and ends up splashing street grime all up my leg, and I can't help but laugh too. She's infectious.

"When we get home, I can show you how to smoke correctly," she offers in half a shout because the sleet it threatening to destroy our newspaper now.

"What the hell is wrong with how I smoke?" I struggle to keep up when the lights of The Industrial finally come into view: the blackened penthouse looms eerily over the colored windows every other floor sports. It's as if the residents there are shouting an affirmation of life by the colors they paint their window glass and the patterns of chintz they drape over the building's vast eyes.

She waited in the doorway while I fumbled with her keys, trying to open that damned vestibule door.

"You smoke that an actor pretending to smoke, sweetie. You ought to do it like you mean it." Her voice was languid but not bored as she explained. It somehow promised patience in the coming lessons.

Yet, even Liza's patience has limits for soon she reached past my hand full of jingling keys and merely gave the entry handle a good swift shove. The door ground its way open under her expert touch and she slipped in under my arm.

But then she froze.

A sound nothing like anything I'd ever known before was tumbling down the concrete staircase. It was the moan of weariness and a growl of hunger all at once, and it ebbed and flowed in a primal rhythm.

Liza stood glued to the tiles of the vestibule, and I could see her reflection in the mirror over the mailboxes; she was transfixed in a type of hypnosis of allure.

The hunger she heard made her hungry, and the primal insistence of the music made her clench her fists and bite her lips in need.

I slammed the door, but not even the noise meant to break her captor's spell had any effect.

I took a deep breath and tugged gently on her elbow. "Liza. Liza, Liza, smoke with me."

Her shining eyes blinked and swiveled to focus on me while she patronized me with half of one of her delicious smiles.

"I have a wonderful ashtray in my room," she said.

I gave half a smile back to her and took her hand. I wondered if two half smiles equaled one whole, or were we both just mocking our own faces?

In her room, Liza kicked off her shoes and picked up a tee-shirt off her floor to dry her feet. I hung my coat on the back of her door and fished my cigarettes out of the pocket, trying not to wonder whose tee-shirt that was.

"Isn't it nice?" she asked. "Scandinavian stone," she held the grayish, dirty ash tray up for me to admire, even though it just looked like a pile of ask that had compounded upon itself for centuries.

"Nice," I said, wishing that closing her door could have closed out that music; if anything, the insidious noise now echoed through my sternum now that I was closer to it. Liza's eyes were bright, and I could tell she felt it, too. She fed on it.

"You make me so happy," Liza sighed.

"I don't make you happy. I make you smile. There's a big difference."

Wishing for Summer: A Fool's Game

One morning soon we will awake to stuck sheets and still air abuzz with cicadas and HVAC engines. The quiet of a summer evening will deafen us.

We'll stand by the windows before sunrise just to luxuriate in the moment of relief that dies bloody red and sweaty at dawn.

We'll have burnt calluses on our fingertips from baked steering wheels and we'll have icy white knuckles when the AC finally blows cold on our hands, direct from the vents.

We'll think back to slow days of ice and snow and sweatshirts and heaters and extra socks.

Misery is so forgiving.

We'll fight the sweat slick skin between our toes where the band aide won't stay and the flip flop thong has flayed our feet.

We'll sit in the cool cinema at noon and squint and blink when we walk back out into the broiling parking lot at three.

It's coming. There's no stopping the endless orange and yellow of weather maps crying with exclamation points about the consecutive days of heat, the fire danger, the drought.

There's no avoiding these inevitable woes, but we have some few days yet.

April is the cruellest month

Reminding us that we will sweat out, the old will die, the young will phase to strange fruit-punch-mouthed ice pop eaters.

Their blue, green, purple, orange tongues a foreshadow to each new disease the artificial dyes, sun lotions, and cold potions will conjure one distant day.

As we squint under a too-bright sun at the harry and hurry of too-bright people, collectively we recall the misery of monochrome months.

We remember gray sweatshirts, gray skies, and slushy gray streets. The cars wore gray coats of grime while out feet stayed in the same gray socks for days because it was just too cold to take them off.

Soon, we become chameleons: orange and brown and red to match the toxic air, the dead land, and the hot blood of scraped knees.

Soon, we shuffle layer upon layer of old skins and see how misshapen we have become.

Soon we will think fondly of those days when we complained and wished for the halcyon days of summer.

We were fools to dream so.

Those days will last too long with junebugs and mosquitoes and where did all the fireflies go?

We'll be so tired before each day has even contemplated folding up her blue blanket and packing it away to wait impatiently, fingers tapping at the horizons (both at once), for the new day.

But the children will play on past dusk and can't we stay up late? But going to bed only means you have to set up the coffee pot and face the rumpled sheets that make you feel dirty right after your third tepid shower.

If only you could stop sweating for five-no-three minutes! My god when did this become the sole desire of a day?

Irritation sets in.

And those people half our age with blue slurpee tongues and vodka breath complain that they don't "git" half the things we say.

So we remember and make note of how much less stupid we were back when, but we can't blame them, considering the way kids are dragged through the world these days instead of brought up in loving homes like we were.

And then I tell you the story we both know by heart about getting in trouble for laughing in the house or screaming in a game outside.

I tell you about the bonfire when I cried and my innocence was exterminated, and you tell me all things change.

I correct you, "Things fall apart."

If only we still had that energy and if the heat didn't make us hurry up the season of death with fervent wishes, and if winter didn't hurt so bad-- deep in the bone hurt... If only, think of what this world COULD be.

It is only meet and right that we blame those who pull the cup from us before our thirsts are quenched, just as our progenitors blamed us.

But that man who blames himself, his generation, for creating this mess you and I inherited: the wold where summer angers killed Jack, Bobby, and Mr. King before my eyes were opened-- One man knows what's what.

Is one enough?

The seasons count off the rampages of civilizations on their fingers.

They're older than we and will still be infants when we are extinct.

Winter snows will cover our graves and spring flowers will bloom from our putrid remains.

Summer will see our mighty works baked to dust, and autumn winds will blow the remains of this world away with the fallen leaves.

Somewhere in the detritus, a human tooth, some wrought metal. Plastic. Only this remains.

We fade but our hubris lingers on, like the mighty warning carved in stone upon the empty desert.

The seasons, the broken trash, and if we are lucky, the words, too, will last to the last spin of this globe.

All of these dreads are in my head as I lie in bed wondering if life might be simpler if I could be dead before April kisses us (wetly) goodbye.

The Grandmothers

I am from home-sewn dresses
From Thanksgiving's spiced pecans
And Sonic's chocolate malts (heavy on the malt).
I am from small, dying towns full of
Elderly people and cemeteries.
I am from old men sitting round the courthouse to gossip
And old women popping by for weak tea and everybody's health.
I am from volunteer flowerbeds.
I am from Wandalene.

I'm from the scent of Winston cigarettes over scrambled eggs and coffee.
I'm from the sound of old house shoes scuffing along dusty floorboards.
I am from Alma Lee.

I'm from mockingbirds scolding young squirrels
And calendars that note the comings and goings of deer.
I am from Georgia Raye.

I'm from longing, pain, and wistfulness
Born of decades of condescension and self-doubt.
I am from Paula Jean.
I'm from the house where daughters are silent,
Laughs are dangerous,
And smiles are suspect.

When Pain Attacks Sleep

This articulated curse holds deep, fast
under the flesh, and stinging hot with such
poison-- spurring pain to radiate past
the places your sweet empathy can touch
and on through sinister recesses hid
by cynicism and a sharp tongue. Heard
wrong, you find me taciturn and tart. Bid 
truth, I claim I brood o'er misremembered
sleights glorified by nostalgia to sin.
These seeds I daily sow will bear no fruit,
but they convolute me outside and in.
Still, I attend these nights' wanton pursuit
of rest, for the day I forfeit the cost
is when my mind or life or both are lost.

Same Pony, Same Trick

You hold a clammy hand against your chest

And mop your dry brow with a handkerchief.

You peer inside your own dull heart without

A scrying glass nor microscope nor book

Of gray anatomy. This lesson needs

One thing: a love, a war, a death, or else

A knife to cut the heart out clean to see

What makes it beat and tick and squelch and squeak.

See the little veins and valves (sticky meat)

And learn one thing: aside from blood and squish

It's an empty thing, bereft of passion

Or love. Our pretty lies are precious things

To us. Yet the tepid heart is hollow

As this poem, your passion, or your phony love.