Poems

This is my poem published in the 2023 edition of the Scurfpea anthology.

My Neighbor the Cynic

My neighbor the cynic

doesn’t believe that i am

ill. Not even when the social

worker sits across from us

at the table in the hospital,

reading the diagnoses

off the paperwork. Still 

scoffs, as if the diseases

aren’t real, as if they are

made-up things in my head,

as if the last 72 hours on

lock-down hasn’t been

reality.

She’s often like this,

needing a second opinion,

or needing to verify it

herself, as if it can’t be true

that someone hacked

my Facebook account,

crashed it, destroyed it,

so that I can’t even log in.

Usually, she says, all you

have to do is log in and 

change your password —

I explain several times

that i can’t log in, explain

until, exasperated, she gives

up, shrugging me off with

a condescending, ‘’I guess.’’

Always like this, I think,

sitting one day in my reading chair.

Always the cynic. Nothing

can ever be true unless she

witnesses it, and even then, she

doubts your motive, questions

your effort — you lost because

you didn’t try hard enough.

But it’s the illness thing

that stays with me most,

that hurts most, that angers

the most. I was, I am, ill.

Four diseases, according 

to my pyschiatrist’s diagnosis,

each of them now life-long,

ameliorated by pills, 

and yet my neighbor has to question

—‘’he doesn’t look sick, there

are no bruises, how can this be?’’

I’d offer her half a leg, if I could,

just to say this is real, the darkness

sweeps in over my brain just

as surely as a man with cancer

sees his cells flipped into damaged

flesh. As surely. And, yet, my neighbor

the cynic probably would

question if the half-leg was

even mine, would think I stole

it from a cadaver room at the med school.

sigh, right? Sigh. The darkness

sweeps in whether she believes

it or not, whether she likes it

or not.

I think, in my case, she is ultimately

afraid of it all being real—of there

really being illnesses like this,

that debiltiate, incapacitate,

that rip brain cells with the force

of a prairie twister, change them,

slow them, bring on nights of

screams and hyperventilation.

and if I can have them, can’t she,

too? Can’t she?

We leave the room with the social worker,

she swinging her handbag back and forth,

maybe nervous, maybe angry,

maybe wondering if anything

is true.