Poem-A-Day #324 : To My Sick Body

To My Sick Body

It is difficult to think with congestion in your face
you can f e e l the styrofoam thickness of the tubes within you
your heartbeat thrumping on the pillow

This is your blood in your veins and it is making sound

We are so resilient
our bodies take the endless radiation of days
manage to up and down stairs and cycle our habits like whoa

But when things fall apart          they do so spectacularly

They crystallize every mistake ever made and cough
them into a mirror at 3 AM
our bodies turn on us so quickly that they cannot make the turn fully

And they will crash in their haste

Will erupt into fever and pitch and fall into a depth of exhaustion
that will leave them in a state of need that only we ourselves can deal with

Fighting for Life

If you walk around a city, any city, avoiding the tourist spots and purposefully heading down small back streets you will eventually become aware of how close together everything is. How on top of each other the spaces are.

Today you can look at these spaces, especially on the nights when trash is piled and rats are hovering, and easily think of them as hotbeds of illness and crime.

Lower East Side today

You will not be surprised that at one time these spaces were deathtraps.

In the 1890s the Lower East Side was the most densely populated square mile on earth. 1/3 of children in the area died before they were 5. Typhus, smallpox, and diarrhea were rampant enough that many wrote off the entire area and the people living there.

Of course this part of the city and those tenement buildings are pretty fashionable these days. But in 1908 the area was still referred to as 'the suicide ward'. That same year S. Josephine Baker became the first director of New York's Bureau of Child Hygiene. By 1911 she had more than halved the death rate of children.

New York tenements 1910

Which is amazing.

And she did it with simple education. Teaching mother's how to properly make formula. How to keep babies protected from the sweltering summers and freezing winters. Basic things, like clothing, and checking in with health professionals.

And it was all a public work. All for free to the woman and children.

In America.

Baker's memoir of that time, Fighting for Life, is a fascinating glimpse into the very recent history of our country. And of the very recent problem of health and living conditions in our cities.

And the whole thing has the air of relevance today.

I couldn't help while reading this to be overcome with a sense that Baker's fight to get poor, immigrant mothers the help they needed with child rearing is akin to the fight over health care today.

It is expensive, unwieldy, and clearly taken for granted by a lot of the country.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act has been rocky. But no more so than any other government program going into effect. In the end it will help a lot of us to be healthier. It will aid our future generations in the same way social security has.

In the same way Baker was able to lower the death rate of children, the ACA will eventually make us healthier people.

The fact that we seem to not see the benefit of this is shortsighted and depressing. But unsurprising. As a country we react to things, we do not pro-act. And we tend to be shortsighted. It is rare that we gaze generations ahead and attempt to set ourselves up to succeed long term.

The New Deal was one of the times we attempted to reach into the future and fix it before we got there. The space program was another. The ACA is yet another.

We just need to not get in our own way.

æstivation

This is poem #751

æstivation 7/22

The sound of cicadas will hum the days and nights
with the soft breeze of evening across the face

And every day will echo the next

Here some mountain air will warm then cool and the
leaves will yellow but not before they green and thick

A silence will come after a hawk cries out

And each day to the lake and then with the toes
in the ice blue water and the fish lips kissing them

A restive sir a calming of the back from spasm

Like Montaigne you will spa and break the stones
of your life into smaller passable silts

Then pray for no infection

Hole

Hole 4/19

Courtney Love is on tour
if that bitch can get out of bed why can’t I?

Daffadowndilly

Daffadowndilly 2/28

There are little fist-shaped buds on the ends of trees

On some date something happened – I dream about
guns at my head and wake in sweats every night

I pounded my fists on the pavement until they were raw
and my nails couldn’t catch fast enough – I have never
screamed so loud in my life

The buds will green and pink and be magnolia cherry
will be lilac soon enough the winter will be over

It goes like this :
            You walk in a dark neighborhood
            You are attacked from behind there could be knives
                        or guns but it’s fists to the temple and break
                        the sight and blood red stars in the vision and
                        here’s the money here’s the money here’s
            You take it like a man like a grown-up
            You never let them see you cry
            You do what you’re sposed ta – call the cops go to the
                        hospital and get yourself checked out for the
                        tidy sum of $2000 US and they pull on you and
                        feed you day old chicken salad
            You don’t call anyone and you get home so late
            You sleep for days and days and days and days
            You tell everyone you’re fine and that’s that

Little fists pushing against the cold – for space – rubbing
at the cosmos to jump-start the world

March comes in like a goddamn lion they say – February
doesn’t get any such sayings – it sits coldly in the corner
and collects the leftovers of the year before

Microsattelite

Microsattelite 2/21

There are so many ways we can go wrong

The man at MoMA –
one side of his face was inflated like a balloon

The man on the subway with the short leg

In pairs I cast stones into the fountain –
and count the times I am lucky

Tenter

Tenter 12/27

Hands on face – skin is thick
cloth on tenter

Laid in the sun and baking

Pores are craving yellow light
to cover the sallow – a touch
of jaundice helps in winter

This bag of skin – this disease
waiting to happen

Teeth looking grey – thin

It’s in the water – nano-things
echoing the sound of sinus
pressure-filled

Hands on face – pulling back
at the eye flesh

Still red and beating in there

Still a gooey mess

Oath

Oath 12/19

I will preserve the purity of my life and my art
So help me God I will not cut for stone

In every house I will keep myself from the pleasures of love with women or with men

I have not any property real or personal conveyed or concealed
All that may come to my knowledge I will keep secret will never reveal

Zoned

Zoned 12/18

Feet – cold – check
Ankles – weak – check
Knees – in pain – check
Legs – general cold – check
Hips – don’t lie – check
Dick – meh – check
Belly – troubled – check
Chest – breathing – check
Hands – see feet – check
Elbows – bending – check
Arms – general ok – check
Shoulders – neck sore – check
Neck – stress sore – check
Face – cold nose – check
Head – see belly – check

Probiotic

Probiotic 12/8

Fix
            Me

Morbid

Morbid 8/20

I spent a day reading about diseases
Looking at abbreviations and diagnosis
Fixating on what I could could could have

Where I've been

I want to open a vein and see it
The pooling red liquid will have something
In it that will tell me where the damage is

Like a tell

The skin is a rampart is a moat a lagoon
And these are the things that can cross it
What sort of rot gets at live flesh

The kind you let in your head

Spa

Spa (1/22)

The line is surface tension - prose wave coming
Come - arthritic joint - soak in the word mineral