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.