The portal to hell is a hole rimmed by steel
where flames feed on themselves and
thrive on the wood of our poor choices.
It is a bottle neck, a choking point that
separates us from others, peeling off
those who in love try to offer support.
It is a journey of loneliness where
flailing limbs cannot find helping hands,
arms pinned to our sides in descent.
And at the bottom, when all hope is lost,
we come face to face with Him who
burns away our self-centered madness.
***
Hammock sways
on a gentle breeze
between sycamore
and maple,
the book open
and steadied
on my stomach.
Ant weaves
through leg hair
tickling me while
a squirrel chirps
not ten feet away
in the branches
above my body.
Mind wavers
between worlds
where pestilence
resets time, or not,
and I am one with
what was and is
and is to come.
***
I think it is safe to say at this point that writing poems has become a habit if not a hobby of mine these past several years. It’s likely no coincidence it began during my time serving as a medical officer in the Army with a deployment to Iraq. It provided a kind of consolation in moments of near total isolation and high stress, necessity being the mother of invention.
But then I can jump back even further to my freshman year of high school in English class. We had a poetry book project due that was supposed to entail finding images from magazines or other collage materials to illustrate 10 poems that we were to write and bind them together. Trying to come up with 10 poems ex nihilo was proving to be too difficult after writing maybe 2. That’s when my mind reversed the process by first finding and combining compelling images and then writing poems about what I felt the images were conveying to me. This was the key to unlocking that particular project.
Fast forward 30 years and this kind of reverse engineering has been a major driver in many of the things I’ve written whether poems or short stories or creative non-fiction/fiction hybrid pieces. The image is the starting point and my mind draws a story or poem from it. This has been my go-to writing prompt on many occasions. That’s not to say I don’t write things first sometimes and then find images for it, but the process can be bi-directional.
So for those of you trying to find a good stress reliever or a way to better understand yourself and the world around you I highly recommend this type of writing prompt. It will surprise you what your mind will find in images and how they can draw out some innate wisdom.
And here is an example of the process from yesterday. I took this photo which I did not find particularly compelling but then I started to think about what it might be saying and out came a kind of morbid poem that is not very good, but it made me laugh to see “teen” and “keen” juxtaposed and I love the alliteration of “waking world of sleeping souls.”
When I lie down
for my last nap
and fail to awaken
what will be
left of me in this
waking world
of sleeping souls?
A vintage metal sign
*DRINK Coca-Cola*
purchased at a
Flea Market
when I was
a teen keen
to collect stuff.
A prayer shrine
made from
scrap wood and
leftover paints
during the isolation
of a pandemic
hung on our fence.
But now they
keep each other
company, hanging
on my garage wall
where they’ll likely
remain until my
efforts end.
***
I saw her in her cubicle in an adjacent building on a Friday and then out in the main hospital on a Monday. They are connected by a hallway, an elevator, and then another hallway that passes by my office. An image came to my mind unbidden: She is in a four-sided cubicle with high white walls that reach nearly to the paneled ceiling.
She works dutifully until the proper time arrives and a white door-sized panel slides upwards releasing her to enter the maze of the hospital. She interacts with other employees and each time her job is done correctly another sliding door, smaller than the first, opens nearby to reveal a tasty snack. This motivates her to continue.
And in this metaphor I see my own wanderings in the hospital up and down stairs, zigzagging through hallways, and in and out of rooms in what amounts to a fabulous gerbil city that confines me throughout the workday in its squared tunnels. I smile and say “Hi” a lot because happy gerbils are productive gerbils (and vice versa).
***
It’s only a pencil nub I found in my daughter’s art supplies, but it is significant. It is part of our shared experience as we sit together on a Sunday morning conceptualizing her Mother’s Day project and talk about things both serious and silly, though mostly silly.
She has a smile that could power a town; a dimple so deep I could fall into it. I am painfully aware these times are limited. She is on the cusp of leaving her childhood behind and even now anticipates the day she will be a mother in what she says and does.
She laughs at the pencil nub as I act out writing tiny script on an impossibly small piece of paper. She tells me she and a friend at school were continuously breaking off the lead, sharpening and re-sharpening, until they created this comical writing utensil.
I feel she is sharpening and re-sharpening me as a human being; watching me shrink day by day even as she grows. I furiously write to better understand myself, the world around me, and to leave a legacy of sorts to my children and my children’s children.
***
We have to see our own faults,
our own shortcomings
and complicity with evil
before the full weight of truth
can inhabit our minds and we
truly see what is to be seen.
Until that happens the truth
about ourselves and the society
we inhabit is intolerable.
It can only be experienced
with denial as an intermediary,
a filter, a fudge, to protect us
from the truth of ourselves and
what we (mis)perceive
of the world around us.
Until that happens there is only justification, not truth.
My younger sister’s kindergarten teacher sent me a Facebook friend request today. Funny thing is, we moved to Orleans, Indiana in the summer before my first grade year so she was never my kindergarten teacher. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, but it does kind of violate my loose and unspoken rule to not friend anyone I do not know directly or have not known long enough to feel some connection to.
***
I went to kindergarten in Knightstown, Indiana. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Stroop. She had medium-length brown hair pulled back in some fashion with a part down the center of her head and large glasses. I don’t remember her being either mean or particularly nice.
Our tables were close to the ground and rectangular shaped. I would guess there were about six of them with six kids each, three to a side, though that is likely an overestimation. They were color coded via a round construction paper circle taped at one end. I sat at the purple table with a kid who had a reputation for being the smartest kid in the class.
I remembered his name well into adulthood but now in my 50’s I can no longer recall it. He looked like a little man with his hair neatly parted on the side and a kind of quiet gravitas. I had not yet become acquainted with Mr. Rogers, but in retrospect this boy looked like the child version. His presence at my table was somehow reassuring, like having our own teacher’s aid if the assignment proved too difficult or inscrutable.
***
Memories at this point are random. I built a cool extended drag racer with some pieces from a tube-shaped can and then put the finished product back in carefully and put the lid on it thinking I could preserve it indefinitely that way. Another kid tried to open the can and I prevented him from doing so by saying “No!” in no uncertain terms which got me in trouble with the teacher. I was preserving my artistic creation for future use but she reframed it as a problem with “sharing”. It was very un-Mr. Rogers-like of me and simply the beginning of a long and illustrious career of mischievousness in school that put me at odds with many of my teachers.
***
That particular school had an old gymnasium attached to it. On rainy days during recess we ran around pell-mell on the basketball floor and scurried up on the stage with teachers constantly imploring us to get off the stage, slow down, and not shove each other. There was a Christmas program there that year and I sat in the dark on a chair facing the stage with a few hundred other people. There was a huge calendar of December on the back wall of the stage. It was decorated like a winter wonderland that I found strangely comforting and being there at night with my parents only intensified the feeling. My older sister was in the program wearing an outfit that matched everyone else's that I seem to recollect was a white top and black skirt for the girls and black slacks for the boys.
Sitting a few seats over in the dark was a neighbor of ours. She was what I would refer to as “rough around the edges”. She was poor and talked in a way that was full of slang and bad grammar that I found disquieting coming from an adult. Once when I was at her house her young son was eating peanut butter from the jar and began choking on something. She became loud and panicky and when the obstruction in his throat was dislodged he vomited. It might have been a marble. I did not return to that house and I have not liked peanut butter since. At the Christmas program her daughter was prancing out on stage behind my sister when suddenly her mother’s voice rang out in the darkness, “Pull up your skirt, Boo Boo!”
***
Twelve years later that small gym would become famous. It was preserved so well over the years without any significant updates that they used it in the movie “Hoosiers” which is set in the 50’s. I don’t have to tell you how surreal it was to watch that movie as a high school senior and see the gym that I hadn’t been in since kindergarten in 1974. It continues to this day to be preserved for its historical significance and can be visited if you are ever in Knightstown.
Interestingly enough my wife went to Butler University and we’ve been to Hinkle Fieldhouse for a basketball game. That gym was also featured in “Hoosiers” because it was used for years as the venue for the Indiana high school basketball championship game.
***
So, Mrs. E, you may have never been my kindergarten teacher but your friend request sent me running down memory lane. I now anticipate waking up in the middle of the night in the near future with that kid’s name from the purple table made evident to my conscious mind. I imagine these days he is probably a NASA scientist or CEO of a company… and I am still mischievous.
The cardinal sings
sweetly from the tree.
Breezes blow and
choir the chimes.
White flower petals
fall like snow.
It is Pascha morning and
Archbishop Paul has passed.
Christ is Risen, indeed!
***
The fairies have moved on
and left me with a daughter
who is old beyond her years.
There are still hints of an
effortless innocence but
it is lessening by the hour.
She wants to attain some
better command of her life
and of her wider world,
but at such a cost!
The fairies have moved on
and they are not coming back.
***
I have such sweet memories of her fairy door at the house where we lived until she was 8 years old. When we moved to our current house 3 years ago we bought a second fairy door and I secretly attached it to a tree in our back yard.
We were playing back there soon thereafter and I “ stumbled upon it”. She looked at me sideways and accused me of orchestrating the discovery. Regardless, she did make some decorations for it during the pandemic with all of that time at home and bought some accoutrements for it as well for imaginative play.
But today I mowed the yard for the first time this year and I saw the door without its decorations looking sad and abandoned. The fairies have moved on and so has my little girl.
When you seemingly run out of things to write about sometimes you end up writing about writing.
***
My recent explorations into the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (KVJ) have been uncovering some startling similarities in outlook and style that I was hitherto unaware of. I am not saying I am in the same league as KVJ as a writer (Heavens, no!) but maybe he is a grown man and I am a kind of baby brother. Maybe we share some DNA but I am significantly smaller in size and lacking in the ability to fully function as an adult (read: “write”) but I keep crawling nonetheless.
***
In continuing to read Suzanne McConnell’s “Pity the Reader: on writing with style” I stumbled upon something this morning that was revelatory. She pointed out that KVJ would doodle during class at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she was a student of his. This was connected to the fact his father and grandfather were architects, his sister was an artist, and his three children were all painters to some degree or other. All this to say that “Vonnegut was tuned and trained to the visual, as well as the audial.” This is followed by the key paragraph which is a KVJ quote:
“The people who were senior to me at the Sun [Cornell University’s newspaper] were full of advice. . . . The theory was that large, sprawling paragraphs tended to discourage readers and make the paper appear ugly. Their strategy was primarily visual—that is, short paragraphs, often one-sentence paragraphs. It seems to work very well, seemed to serve both me and the readers, so I stayed with it when I decided to make a living as a fiction writer.”
These ideas are revelatory to me because over the past 10 years that I’ve attempted to grow as a writer I’ve used photographs/creative images along with short almost poem-like paragraphs to convey what I want to convey to my (mostly imaginary) readers. I keep these writings in my blog and you can scroll through hundreds of entries without finding one that lacks an image or has an unwieldy paragraph in it (never mind the preponderance of poems).
I used to think this approach might be a crutch, but now that I’m reading this about KVJ I feel I can embrace it freely as my particular way of communicating what is inside me. As an added bonus, the doodles I’ve made in countless classes and meetings over the years no longer need to be a source of shame or embarrassment.
***
Maybe my job has something to do with it as well or there has been some cross-pollination going on. I am a Consultation Liaison Psychiatrist at a hospital and I see patients who are primarily there for medical reasons but with a significant psychiatric overlap. Other services consult me to have patients evaluated for a variety of reasons to include psychosis, mania, suicidality, delirium, dementia, withdrawal, depression, anxiety… and the list goes on.
It is important that my documentation is accessible and easily understood. I accomplish this in part by utilizing short pithy paragraphs that are easy on the eyes and do not bog you down in a mass of words on the screen. It is a common pitfall when I have medical students or residents working with me that they will try and submit a complex Borg-box of dense writing that no one will bother to read or if they have to read it they will become irritated in the process. No one enjoys being forced to be “assimilated”.
***
It is in this context that I can better understand what I’ve been trying to do with a peculiar structural style that began with a writing experiment from 2016. It started as a writing exercise where I was meandering with an idea but keeping all the paragraphs small and of uniform size, almost like a poem. At some point I realized it was actually helpful in moving the story along and forcing me to be more deliberate in what I was trying to say and what images were being conveyed. Instead of a diarrhea of words I was dropping rabbit pellets along a path to an ending.
After I finished this first experiment (The Hovel) I assumed it was a one-off and just an exercise of sorts, but the second time I tried it the flow returned and carried me along in a way that was unlike the struggles of “free” writing. And now I have about six or seven of these type stories in my blog. They are visually peculiar, like bricks stacked one on top of the other. Maybe this is not exactly what KVJ had in mind but I enjoy it and hopefully it can “serve both me and the readers” whomever they may be.
I dreamed this morning that I was with my 17 year old son on a hill overlooking a high school. He was a bit despondent and said he would like to turn back time 7 years. Somehow this was possible and I asked if he was sure about such a momentous decision. He assured me that he was and I agreed to come with him and share the experience.
My thoughts ran along the lines of what he and I could do differently with this added time and foreknowledge that would be ours. I mentioned something to him offhandedly about being more aggressive on the basketball court in order to gain more success. I really didn’t think about myself and what I might do as 7 years didn’t seem like much at my age.
So the decision was made and in the distance beyond the high school the sky began to blossom into what appeared to be a pink and red energy field with crackling tendrils. I wondered if it might be radioactive or harmful to us in some way and I suggested we run into the high school for some protection. Elias refused and it enveloped us.
I found myself standing over him in his old room in our old house. He was now 10 and no longer taller than me. In a kind of dazed disbelief I tried to tousle his hair with an aggressive rub but it was too short for that. He looked up at me with a smile but there was a sadness in his eyes. We had done the unimaginable and there was no going back.
***
I will float here for just a bit. There is no fear, no vertigo, only a pregnant-now that swells with the sound of wind and rain. Round dots of color are blooming on the street below as pedestrians open their umbrellas.
They scurry along not knowing that I am watching them as God must from up above. “Hello! I love you!” There is a strong smell of ozone and water on hot concrete all around, but then the whiff of a flower wafts through on a breeze.
How long will I stay in this state? As long as I can. As long as the image stays clear in my mind and the flow of formless music continues through my thoughts. I believe the cottage on the roof of the building is mine. I gladly claim it.
I descend to its door and stand on the flagstone path. The smells now are of wet wooden shingles and a mild moldiness. My heart expands and contracts in my chest, my body a bellows of melancholy memories. “Mom? Are you home?”
It is empty but there is a kettle steaming on a wood burning stove. I find a cup in a cupboard and blow out the dust. Further foraging reveals dried tea leaves in a tin that I dump into the kettle and allow it to steep while I explore the space.
A small cast iron bed sits against the wall under two windows with a green wool blanket tucked in and finished out with a white sheet folded over its lip. A threadbare rug covers a good bit of the plank floor. The tea is ready and I pour myself a cup.
Outside the cottage there is a side table and chair underneath a large umbrella. I sit in its shade with my tea and look to the horizon from my high perch. A bird lights on the edge of a window box full of flowers and fixes me with its gaze.
I sense the bird is a conduit of sorts and I open myself to communicate to and through it. I feel myself surrendering to a deep flow of affection that is timeless and impossibly light. As the bird launches into flight I follow it into the yielding air.
And land on this padded seat in a corner of the Physician’s Dining Room, my fingers tapping out these words as the dream recedes and others nearby talk boisterously about sports and politics. It is a place of respite, but only in my mind.
***
Ancient Beast of Impossible Derivation
we call to your bones and lost sinews
to reassemble into woeful vengeance.
Strike down our enemies but not be-
fore sowing terror and painful discord.
We have suffered enough in dishonor.
Our humiliation has reached its nadir.
The time for mercy has passed us by.
Empty mouths now cry out for blood.
ABID, we bid you to undo what is done.
***
I’d like to put in a plug for writing. It has been a lifesaver for me through some pretty dark times, especially in the past few years of this pandemic. It’s been a way to connect with others in a world where isolation can be crushing. In the past decade it has even been a dialogue through time and space between me and my younger self who exists only in memories but influences so much of what I say and do in the here and now.
Maybe the form of writing at hand is a poem because they are short and “easy”. I didn’t say “good”, just easy in the sense they can be written down quickly and concisely. I leave iambic pentameter and the outpouring of cantos to other more skilled practitioners. And rhyming is fun, but I do not use it very often. I mostly settle for micro-bits of emotion and glimmers of insight that pop out from time to time, like when heat transforms a kernel of corn into popcorn. If I can capture these burst kernels on paper the benefits are more filling and longer lasting.
Memories of younger years generate a fair amount of what I’ve written, but the other major source is photographs I’ve taken. I highly recommend this strategy for generating words because for me it has inspired the lion’s share of what I have written in the past decade and been a well of ideas to draw from. It is typically something peculiar that catches my eye and suggests a story of some kind, like a Rorschach test.
I’ve also benefited from books that give advice and/or ideas for writing prompts. These include “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg, “On Writing” by Stephen King, and “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron among others. I used these mostly in my early to mid-40’s when I was trying to get started writing before transitioning to using childhood memories and photographs as the major sources for inspiration and writing ideas. And speaking of childhood, my kids have done their fair share of heavy lifting in regards to being my muses.
Most of the writing advice I’ve come across emphasizes the importance of reading and reading a lot. This is especially true of Stephen King who follows his own advice and has written book reviews for books that I’ve ended up reading due to his enthusiasms. I have to say I don’t read a lot nowadays but when I was a kid I read all the time to escape the mundaneness of small town life. I had a penchant for Fantasy with Science Fiction as a close second (and then Roger Zelazny blew my mind by mixing the two).
Most recently I’ve gotten on a Kurt Vonnegut kick and I’m watching the documentary “Unstuck in Time” on Hulu. I’m also reading “PITY THE READER - on writing with style” by Suzanne McConnell who uses KV as her touchstone for writing and writing advice. I’ve learned a lot from his brevity of style that he attributes to his early writing years when he was doing a lot of journalistic work which requires one to get to the point quickly and distill things down to their essence as much as possible. His literary journal “So It Goes” has become a home for some of my poems and photographs and something I look forward to submitting to every year.
All that to say, whatever your motivation or life experiences, writing may very well be the “easiest” and most accessible way of engaging in a therapeutic process. I highly recommend it.
***
There is something undeniably powerful about a Girl Scout cookie thin mint. Today I saw a nurse’s assistant come into the 6th floor work area with an armful of those lovely green boxes and I made comment about how much I love them. She offered to sell me a box from her limited supply but when I told her I had no way to pay her she said I could pay for it when I see her next.
That’s when the Nurse Manager swept in and bought a box for me despite my protestations. It was an act of kindness that I wasn’t sure I deserved and it made me a bit verklempt. It became clear to me in that moment that I would be remiss if I did not share this windfall with others in this place that has been so good to me over the years.
I quickly took on the role of a thin mint street dealer by hiding the box in my inside jacket pocket and sidling up to people with a whisper, “Hey, you wanna thin mint?” and giving them only the slightest glimpse of the green box. The smiles were worth a lifetime supply of thin mints and by the time I was headed out the door for the day I’d eaten about four and given the rest away.
To be honest, I don’t know what came over me when I was handed that box of cookies. My inclination was to hurry back to my office and eat them in the dark like Gollum on his island in the cave with his “Precious”. But there are few things more precious to me than my coworkers at Grant Medical Center.
***
In the search for grand vistas
or man-made wonders
let’s not forget the beauty of us.
Even if we wander through galleries of
priceless paintings and stunning sculptures
let’s not forget the beauty of us.
You know, there are two of us
who made two more, doubling the love
that is the beauty of us.
***
Jesus needs His sandwich
and I nearly forgot it in my haste
to leave the hospital today.
I got as far as the parking garage,
my driver’s side door partially open,
when it hit me, “Jesus needs…”
So I sprinted back to the hospital
and snatched up a ham with
muenster and a bottle of water.
Sure enough, he was standing
in his typical spot at the bottom
of the exit ramp with his sign.
He greeted me with a crooked
smile and a pensive wave but
I knew it was Him standing there.
The beard and longish hair was
a dead give away, frequenting
the highways and the byways
as I’d read in the Good Book.
I didn’t want to be caught
empty handed when I met Him.
So Jesus got his sandwich today
and He said “God bless you”.
Score! What a lucky man I am!
***
Is there a more clear-sighted observer of our modern American experience than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.? That is a rhetorical question.
I couldn’t tolerate his stories when I was younger because I was trapped in the warm delusional embrace of the insulated American Midwest. When it came to our historical and national consciousness it was all a Ra Ra self-congratulatory affair with flags flapping from poles and porches throughout my town. It didn’t help that the Soviet Union was such a monstrous system as a point of comparison on the other side of the world. We were pretty darn good in that light, right? But we were human beings just like everyone else on the planet with similar foibles and outright repugnant behaviors mixed in with moments of selflessness and virtue.
Our black and white way of seeing things outwardly had a tendency to turn inwardly creating a bind. If we personally were either black or white, who can tolerate thinking of themselves as black? So that left being white and therefore in a state of self-delusion and denial as a way to square that circle. I’ll leave the implications for racism to your imagination as just one aspect of that phenomenon.
And KVJ ruthlessly destroyed all of this in his short stories and novels in the most humorous of ways. He was honest enough about his approach to quote a British critic “who said that I put bitter coatings on sugar pills, and I consider that fair”. His witnessing of the utter destruction and decimation of Dresden by the Allied Powers was the purifying event that opened his eyes, traumatic as it was, like a huge slap in the face. Wake up!
I was probably in my thirties before I had an “ear to hear” what KVJ was telling me. It took at least a decade post-high school with stints in the Army, living overseas, medical school, and changing my childhood religion to open my eyes to what he had to show me. Suffering was a key teacher in that regard. I had to get past myself and the need for self-justification.
And now I must circle back to the idea of "love of country". I love my friends, family, and community as concrete points of interaction. This is my “USA”. What I don’t love so much are the abstractions created by the powers that be to manipulate me for their own purposes.
And Kurt, God bless him, asserted in Breakfast of Champions that “at the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.” I believe it is a light that dispels the darkness of hatred and ignorance if we let it.
***
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