Feeling Squeezed at the Grocery Store I Conclude that the Propensity to Ignore Pain is Not Necessarily Virtuous, but Continue Shopping and Gather the Ingredients for Ham Fried Rice because That’s What I Cook When My Wife is Out-of-Town and I’m Not in the Mood for Italian, and Dammit I’m Not Ill, Merely a Little Inconvenienced, and Hey, in the 70’s I Played Football in Texas, and When the Going Gets Tough…
I answer work email in the checkout line. Drive home, take two aspirin.
Place perishables in refrigerator. Consider collapsing in bed. Call wife.
Let in dog. Drive to ER, park. Provide phone numbers. Inhale. Exhale.
Repeat. Accept fate and morphine. Ask for lights and sirens, imagine the
seas parting. On the table, consider fissures and cold air, windows and
hagfish. Calculate arm-length, distance and time. Expect one insertion,
receive another. Dissonance in perception, in reality. Turn head when
asked. Try reciting Kinnell’s “The Bear.” Try again, silently this time.
Give up. Attempt “Ozymandias.” Think of dark highways. Wonder about
the femoral, when and how they’ll remove my jeans. Shiver uncontrollably.
The events in this poem took place more than eight years ago. A lifetime ago.
O at the Edges 
Ow. I’m glad this is retrospective but some pains are timeless.
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It caused me to reevaluate my life, and consider what I really wanted to do. I retired from my stressful job seventeen months later, and continued making adjustments/changes after that. I’m happy to be where I am today!
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I am feeling that 100% ^_^
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This must be the longest title of anything I’ve read. There is a lot to absorb in this posting as well.
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I confess that I drafted this in a workshop in which the instructor limited us to ten line poems. So I decided to let the title carry some of the burden. I admit to being a contrarian at times… 🙂
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So might be good to choose a poem now, begin self-reading to store in memory before anticipated surgery? Betting there will be unanticipated challenges when the day comes …
Glad you came through your challenges to write this!
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I wasn’t supposed to be able to remember the procedure, but the amnesiac drug apparently didn’t affect me. Kinnell’s “The Bear” was a tad ambitious (way too long) for a semi-conscious individual, and “Ozymandias” was all I could handle. Ha!
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