jonberger

The drugs help immensely
keeping all the balls in the air.
Without Daddy’s Little Helper
I couldn’t meet half my goals in a week
like leaving the house
getting dressed
locking the door
bathing regularly
eating
smiling occasionally.

It’s the good stuff I take
to stay so organized.
I don’t know what I’d do without it.

Well, I suppose you could give it a try.
Yes, “doing the right thing” is all well and good,
but do you really think you’re up to it this time?
Others have talked about it before,
but is it an alternative that’s right for you?

I’m just not sure if you’ve got the stuff to give it a go.

It takes a certain sort of spine
a certitude, a polar belief system
or at least a book of rules to guide one.
Do you have a book? Can you read?

All right, you’ve got that, at least.

So you can give it a try, this “right and wrong” thing.
It’s a good enough time to try something new.
I wouldn’t advise investing too much into it, though.
If it goes bad, who do you think’ll get blamed?

The next poem will be filled with metaphors
and similes
and rhymes and parallelograms
and syllogisms, aphorisms,
and things that make you go hmm
("things that make you go hmm.")

The next poem will be perfectly
exceptional, delectable, intrasexual
and wholly irrational to the common eye.
It’ll be something else
and something else again.

But it’ll only get there
if you get past this one.

We skipped out of my Elementary School Graduation Celebrationsbecause my best friend Josh was in the hospital.
I say it was because he was having his chin fixed
but he thinks it was for something a little more life-and-death.
Maybe he knows better.

My parents took me to where Josh recuperated
and I saw him unconscious, knocked out on anesthesia,
helpless, thinned out from surgery,
obviously beaten down by the process,
and I thought, "What have they done to him?
How could this cosmetic surgery possibly be worth all of this?"

My friend seemed so weak, and for what?

Now to hear him tell it, there was some serious illness going on,
but that’s not what I remember, and I thought it was a darn shame
that he would go so far just to have a nicer chin.

"Plastic surgery," I thought, "is fucking dumb."

And that is an opinion I hold to this day
despite how irrelevant it may be
to the truth of my best friend’s life.

It proved to be a regular process;when I found I had to call Jennifer for homework
I first had to conquer my labored breathing,
calm the blood racing past my ears
make sure I’d spent some time in the bathroom
and prepped a couple of sentences.
Not exactly practiced saying anything,
but planned out possible subjects
other than asking what Dr. Blake wanted us to do in class.

Even thinking about making the call now
is building the anxiety
and I know she hasn’t usedthe number for decades now.
(I’ve checked!)

Every call to that Junior
that meant everything to me
set off a series of nervous explosions in me
– and she was always pleasant,
always kind. She never seemed interested,
but was never hurtful.
I appreciate that.

I don’t know the number of pounds
I lost in reaching out to Jennifer
in high school.
It wasn’t enough.

I told her I should gobut she wanted to be a good host.
She said, "You’re staying put,"
and I agreed, weakly,
because I was doing everything weakly that day.

It was probably the Po’ Boy that did me in.
It was years after Katrina
but the waters down there were still polluted
and there was risk in the seafood
if you got it at the wrong place.
I never shopped fancy,
so maybe that was why I’d spent the last eight hours
puking and shitting everything I’d ever breathed in
out of my system and into every pipe her apartment had.

It wasn’t a good time.
She tried to be patient.
I tried to sleep through my misery.
We’d barely been getting along before my body betrayed me.
The illness might have made things better
until she saw I’d vomited in the tub.

"You have to clean that up!" she shouted
and I agreed, except I couldn’t quite hold my head up yet.
I went into the bathroom with a dishtowel and a bottle of bleach
and tried to wipe everything down
as much as things could make sense in my head.
As memory serves, I did a lousy job.

I could stand upright
in time for my flight back to New York.
I could pay bills
to make up for my lousy guesting
the last days of my stay.
I assume it doesn’t even things out,
but I think I got paid back in the end.

On a break from college
when I was young and pretty
I was giving a woman a piggyback ride
while carrying a box of files.

I didn’t hear the crack.
I did feel it, though.

I put the woman down, apologizing,
carried the box a little further,
and then dropped that, too.
I went home and wondered what the fuck happened.

I discovered the words “bad back,”
and thus, my mortality.
No longer was I a young god.
At 20 years old, I wasn’t invulnerable anymore.

I found a local chiropractor who gave me some relief
but I realized there were things beyond my limits,
like walking upright or being able to touch my toes.
I’d never been much for physical fitness
but now I was nowhere near physically fit.

Chiropractic helped a lot. So did exercise
– when I thought about doing them. I got better
but my back plagued me.
Along with my weight, my spine caused me trouble
for decades – but weirdly, as I gained
additional hundreds of pounds
the blubber seemed to protect my core
and my back stopped giving me any kind of shit.

Declaring it is usually the death knell for good things
so no doubt I’ve jinxed it
but I haven’t had spinal issues for over a decade now,
even as I’ve thinned out.

Strange magic, that.

The week had been kind of incredible
but I was ready to go home.
Hong Kong was a blur.
Britain had given it back
a year and half before
and now I had visited
– so things were really changing for the place!

I’d finished the work
I had come to do
and ready to go home
so I rushed to catch a cab
to the airport
so I could hurry up
to the plane I’d be on
for the next 24 hours or so.

The taxi moved swiftly
but I didn’t know how long in advance
I needed for these international flights
so I dashed out of the car
and took a bad step on the curb.

My ankle did something really wrong.
I felt it, but I couldn’t react to it.
I had places to be.
So I skipped along to Check-In,
then hobbled to wait to board the plane.

English was fairly universally spoken
but I was still a stranger in a strange land.
I wasn’t comfortable asking for things.
I ended up buying a soda
to lay against my foot.
I waited for other people to file into Business Class
before I made my way
so I wouldn’t hold others up.
I edged my way to the seat.

When we got in the air
I explained my predicament, and asked for some ice.
They were very helpful but hours of flight
left me unsurprisingly swollen.
I was told to keep my leg up.
I was taking all the advice I could.

I stayed in place a lot.
I went to the bathroom very little.
The trip was long anyway
but it was longer due to my condition.

When we arrived in New York
I was last one off the plane
and as I leaned on everything to head off
one of the attendants suggested a wheelchair.
“Could I?” I asked, overjoyed. I’m a big fan of wheelchairs.
My parents were waiting to pick me up at JFK.
They knew nothing about what was going on.
They would get such a kick out of this!

I don’t know what went through their heads
when they saw their only child arrive
late off an international flight,
suddenly handicapped.
but I do not believe my parents experienced a kick.

We went directly to a doctor
and it was verified that I only had a sprain
and I grew up to be the healthy man
that I eventually grew past.

And I got to walk with a cane for a while!

I have another young memory that I’m not sure is really mine
but rather comes from folk tales,
family stories told to me,
and imagination, healthy fiction
that I have come up with,
building a lively reality,
rather than anything real.

I think sometimes I am viewing
from the camera’s POV
rather than experiencing the events
where I am carrying this see-through blue container
of seaglass and shells
in a darkened loft-space
full of overgrown plants and wooden floors.

Everything is oversized, for I am very young
and I am carrying my bottle carefully.
It is quite the prize, and it is delicate.
It is so delicate, in fact,
that it explodes in my hands
and glass embeds into the base of my left thumb
leaving a small mark that remains
to this day.

I believe there are kernels to this story
that have been embellished
from what I’ve been told,
but I cannot believe the lush complexity
of what I remember.
There is too much detail.
I have little faith in the color.

The storyteller is too often a liar
and his origin simply cannot be trusted.

On a warmer day
I snuck into a water park
on the Cape with a young lady
that I happened to know.
Her father asked me to sub
so he could prepare dinner.
He gave me the bracelet
he had used in the morning
and his daughter as a prop.
It was effortlessly smooth.
Insidious, after all, is my middle name.

The park was fun. We changed
into suits and got down
to the business of getting wet.
There was a maze in which
we rode in sea dragons.
There were a couple of little pools.
The best were probably
the slides.

None of this was big kid stuff.
The slides were maybe a story tall,
if that, and I watched the girl go down
to make sure everything went all right.
Splash.
Then I sat down on the slide
and went down to the bottom.
SPLASH!
Well, all right.

We circled the place a few times.
Somehow, on her little legs,
she got a bit ahead of me.
She jumped down the slide to the watery depths.
Splash!
Steps behind, I leapt to the start of the slide
and hit my head on cement.
“Ow?” I thought, as I kerplunked
down to the water.
THUNK.

I could see a blaze before my eyelids
when I eventually stood
from the bottom of the well
but I couldn’t see the girl.
A couple of boys – teenagers – asked if I was all right.
“Sure,” I said, “I gotta go.”
I had to find her.

“Luna!” I called, as I moved slowly,
not entirely sure what I was capable of
as my vision refocused. “Luna?”
An attendant also asked how I was doing.
“I’m fine,” I said, “I just gotta find the kid.”
It’s not like she was mine.
She wouldn’t necessarily look for me.
If I collapsed, what would she do?
Shit, I couldn’t collapse.

I limped around, looking for Luna.
Why was I limping? My legs weren’t hurt.
My head throbbed, and as I put my hand back,
I wasn’t sure if I was finding blood.

It took ten minutes that felt like fifty
to find the girl who’d been looking for me,
wondering where I’d gotten off to.
She didn’t see the fall
or know anything was out of the ordinary.
We went into a big pool after that
where she just started diving
and I let my head occasionally rest
in the cool cool water.

I thought about stopping by the First Aid Center
but then figured I’d have to report my identity
and then the fact that I hadn’t bought a ticket might come up.
It didn’t seem worth it.
As we stayed in the water
the lump on the back of my head was growing
but the throbbing was basically gone.
Luna didn’t seem too worried about it
because children are monsters
and soon enough, the park was ready to close.

We walked back to the house
where mirrors showed me
a better view of my own personal carnage
and I wondered if I would live through the night.
Remembering that my father died from a subdural hematoma
I considered going to a hospital
then shrugged if off.
It’d probably be fine.

Dinner was all right.