To  have 
Some form of discovery, 
Some sense of learning
To the wasted hours, days, and months, 
Do any of the convalesced do
When having no stilted wands 
Of ambulatory appendages, 
To facilitate, 
By the act of mere walking, 
The magic, the parting, the disappearing acts  
To all these oppressive
Baneful fixations of thought--
Thought,  all respective thought, like a scratched record 
Replaying on the player disrespectful, 
All tortuous thought torturous replays when
The game of resilience and stoicism 
Is only able to  
Be played for so long, and so
We must be drunk on something;
Thus, we, alpha males
Imbibe the pain, sucking it into our breath
When we can. 
The spider, dear spider
Crawl,  now, my pet, over to the
Foot of the bed 
With the missing foot. 

Yes, many wistful souls in this room
No doubt like me, revert
To past events
As horrific as they might have been-- 
Childhood, abused as it usually was, 
And the mad monkeys that we  always were
Drunk on fermented fruit of thought, 
Believing life to be
Scent and song of the present moment
There forever, 
Families a permanent fixture. 
They, these patients, go there, into the past, 
For some  winsome solace
Especially when the mortars of shrieks in night
In this large room, 
Are this loud (romance of candlelight
Tried before but to no avail
But burned bunks and bunkers) . 

How in such devastation--
Ruins and debris this deep, 
One once again
Becomes engaged
In the small connections
Of life ( the taste of food that will be served, 
How it will be cooked--
It will be cooked with the
Viands of the slaughtered hides of men,
That one can be sure of, 
Russian and Ukrainian men, men;
The mellifluous voice of
The nurse's assistant
When one is able to hear it, 
When one can find it) 
Is nothing short of a miracle. 

Sometimes
When pills come
And one can briefly
Step outside of pain, 
Nursing assistants, 
Occasional nurses, 
Creatures with hair in buns, 
Cause us to salivate 
Like hungry hounds
No different than Russians
Who would rape anything from 7 to 70
If given the chance. 

Electricity needs conduit of wires, 
Fire a dry carbon object as fuel, 
But when the Russians blow  up
Our nuclear plants
Or vaporize neighborhoods
With tactical nuclear weapons, 
No spider web of circuitry would be needed
As conduit 
When air itself was conduit enough. 

When man so needed to be distracted
When thought so needed to be diffused--
Its air of noxious smoke 
Its hot ashes
That shroud
The way those  in Pompei were shrouded
In hardening ash
What do we do
But awake, startled, by those tiled patterns
That in nightmares
Became the deceased in mass graves
Talking amongst themselves
Of the aesthetic qualities
Of  fully decomposed
Noses or earlobes
Beginning to mold. 

And in the days
(Death is the nights) , 
We count rain stained lines
Of a ceiling, or formulate
Inane questions to self like
What is dust, 
Answering, "What is it if not
the decay of organic matter
Filling empty corners". 

Fire a dry carbon object as fuel, 
But when the Russians blow  up
Our nuclear plants
Or vaporize neighborhoods
With tactical nuclear weapons, 
No spider web of circuitry would be needed
As conduit 
When air itself was conduit enough. 
Forlorn, touch me, radiate me
To oblivion.