"ventilator" poems
a wacko version of hamlet
the patient came up to us raving
GOODNIGHT, GOODNIGHT
a naked swollen giant
his basketball ***** his endless belly
every system failing
we prepared to put him out
so we could stick a tube down his throat
plug him on a ventilator
and insert lines for safekeeping
GOODNIGHT, I LOVE YOU
he tried to lean off the bed
take it easy man, i said, restraining him
SUSAN
who’s susan? asked the nurse
GOODNIGHT, GOODNIGHT, GOODNIGHT
good night, sweet prince, i said as we gave him the drugs
GOODNIGHT, I LOVE YOU, GOODNIGHT
we intubated him and took him down to the OR
where he passed twenty minutes later
Aug 13, 2018
Aug 13, 2018 at 6:08 AM UTC
eye lids move slowly
over the eyeballs
in an effort to garner
sleep to a worn out
body to restore the
metabolism to normality
yet sleep eludes
the slight movement
of the eyelids never felt before
is sensed as the brine tear
a lubricant between the interface
where surface tension dominates
all other forces of physics
what force dominates my heart?
I know not
and sleep eludes me
Unconstrained emotions flow
around like unsettled dust
particles glowing in the sunlight
that escapes in through a ventilator hole
sedatives themselves are sedated
and sleep eludes me
I still have five more days I foresee
before hallucinations and delusions
take over me
before that oh sleep like gandalf
arriving at helms deep
please come back to me
but not at the breaking of the dawn
not when light is bright
but in silence of the mysterious night
Jun 24, 2014
Jun 24, 2014 at 2:49 PM UTC
It’s strangely busy around the deathbeds,
as well it’s my last nightshift of the year.
I try to make no noise, can you hear me?
Push my hand, if you can, move a limb.
Your breath is so slow, please keep going,
monitors flash in time with the ventilator.
I’ll control the pupils, I know it’s blinding.
No one goes with their sparkling old eyes,
we are usually fading before we are dying.
Dec 17, 2021
Dec 17, 2021 at 2:22 AM UTC
I envied the cadavers haunting my nightmares,
watching those before me
spread upon a metal slab
bodies are hand-me-downs of regurgitated poetry,
with wretched closets in which I take their place.
This ventilator called "loved ones"
forcing breath into anguished lungs-
tragedies belonging to these poets meant something,
a desire to save the words written,
but never the one who becomes a eulogy.
Agony burrows inside of me,
conversations with my mother's ghost
still,
the living are possessed by
the dead's shortened tomorrows.
To die by suicide wouldn't give,
authenticity to hurt.
I am learning the autopsy of a soul:
extracting a heart from the chest,
as it's sense of belonging was never there.
An inability to weigh the words bleeding from valves,
aside lungs I'm unable to breathe through.
How ungrateful is it of sorrow to ask for hope?
placed in a pill divider to swallow,
muscles within my throat so tight.
Wondering,
How many times did I diminish my voice?
Inside the brain,
schematics of labyrinths with no end to betterment.
Surgeons reach for a soul,
an iridescence small enough
held in a gloved palm,
watching it writhe.
Placed upon a slide,
but even a microscope
cannot perceive the pain a soul hides.
Once more,
stitched with needle and thread.
Wilting of my own garden,
comes one day-
an incision is made opening me up.
My heart showed the same
blood-red ink, writing apologies
on the marble floor.
They opened my arm,
displaying a noose of veins.
In this moment,
they removed my soul
only to gift it to another
birthed from torment
ripped out of the arm's of their mother
& into the embrace of woe.
—V.H.
Mar 8, 2018
Mar 8, 2018 at 12:01 AM UTC
I don't dream of you either. Not at night. The occasional daydream occurs. You crawl into my mind in sentimental coffee shop conversations we never shared, love made in hotels we never went to, picking up naked dolls with frayed blonde hair that the daughter we'll never have left out. Sometimes it's lovely not to question the reality.
Usually the night drives keep me in Oklahoma. I don't know how many times I've stopped in Kingfisher to look at that terrible statue of Sam Walton. But he reminds me that no matter how successful a man becomes, in the end his legacy is depicted by his leftovers. There's a sadness in that. But also a freedom.
Wednesday's drive took me to Ulysses, Kansas. Light pollution gave up just outside of Woodward. Guiding me like a weary wise man who forgot his frankincense, stars beamed and made for suitable company. I love passing through small towns at night. I become a ghost. I'm above them. I'm not exactly there. Brief haunt. Then on my way again.
I parked about 100 feet from my grandmother's old house. Judging by the minivan, some young family's new house. They were in the process of adding to the east side. I wanted to tear at every fresh board. Instead I picked up a couple pieces of my grandmother's gravel. Put them in my pocket. Touched her old mailbox, and drove to the cemetery.
When I got to the headstone, which read Merle and Virgil Mawhirter, I thought back to the last thing my grandmother said to Karen and myself. We visited her in the hospital right before she found herself in the pangs of a ventilator and scattershot science. It was her birthday. I bought her a book she never read.
As Karen and I left, she stopped us. "Don't forget to bring me some ice cream. Good to see you, Floyd and Margie." Not sure who they were. Ice cream. Even at the end, she laughed in the face of diabetes.
Do you think Tim will be the name beside yours on your headstone?
I lied down by my grandparents' graves. Dim moonlight seeped through small breaks in the amethyst clouds. Dead leaves feathered to the ground beside me. I wanted to say some words of encouragement to her. For her, but mostly for myself.
All I said though -- My name is Joshua, Grandma.
Oct 18, 2012
Oct 18, 2012 at 12:38 PM UTC
Impregnate your old crock squirtin'
Papier—mâché blackball on the *****
Oglin' for upshot
And whatever frigs our orifice
Yeah Ducky **** **** it bud
Milk the meatiness in a snog stranglehold
****** all of your bazookas at once
And unclench into ventilator
I like dung and tinsel
Shandy ****** fuss
Breedin' with the puke
And the Weltanschauung that I'm in statu pupillari
Yeah Ducky **** **** it bud
Milk the meatiness in a snog stranglehold
****** all of your bazookas at once
And unclench into ventilator
Like a punctilious Zeitgeist's nincompoop
We were born, born to be unstatesmanlike
We can spirt so penetrating
I never wanna croak
Born to be unstatesmanlike
Born to be unstatesmanlike
Mar 28, 2010
Mar 28, 2010 at 5:05 PM UTC
The color of death is not black, is not white.
Not red, not gold.
Think: ashen skin.
Think: where did the blood go?
Think: pale, so ******* pale.
Bruise again. He’s going to bruise again.
Mottled red and purple and blue and green and yellow.
That’s what the body does after death. Blood runs down
to the lowest bend of the body and bruises the skin.
The rust of cerebrospinal fluid as it sloshes
back and forth
in the bag hanging above the bed.
My mother’s hands:
white knuckled and gripping down on washcloths
to prevent her from breaking the skin of her palms.
The constant hum of telemetry,
the soft whoosh of the ventilator.
The human body has roughly 7% of its weight in blood.
The human body has no ******* idea what to do when
there is too much or too little of really anything.
Think: blood vessel bursting.
Think: cells mutating.
Think: proned patient coding after intubation.
Bruised. His hands were bruised from all the needle-sticks,
from his lack of platelets. And a single transfusion only goes so long.
Goes three weeks long.
The hands on the belly, laid so gently, so carefully are
covered in makeup. The hair is parted wrong with a cowlick.
I know how they created that soft smile on his closed mouth.
I’ve read the books.
I’ve heard the talks from morticians.
They’ve made my grandfather tan, but
I know what’s underneath the foundation:
grey.
May 9, 2021
May 9, 2021 at 10:55 PM UTC
had a picture of dad on my nightstand
it fell not too long ago
but landed upright
atop his shoe shine box that I kept
its new position not precarious
I let it stay there
thought it was kinda fitting
a picture from his older years
taken in the kitchen
looking up into the camera
from the task at hand
peeling boiled potatoes
for potato salad
my potato peelin' pop
morning sun shine spot lights that picture
warm, smiling, reassuring
mom's back in ICU now
transferred to rehab with high hopes
bleeding, unresponsive
cardiac arrest en route back to ER
x-rays, CT scans
transfusions, blood draws, ventilator
endoscopy?
colonoscopy?
dialysis?
quality of life questions
the more I watch her
the more I wonder
How I wish pop could tell us what to do
Sep 22, 2014
Sep 22, 2014 at 4:40 AM UTC
From my new book, Poems of Ancient Rome and Greece, available in paperback on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as eBook on Kindle, Nook, and Apple Books: https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Ancient-Greece-Christopher-Saitta/dp/B0DS6933HB?ref_=ast_author_dp
My mother the sea,
She woke my sandy eyes,
Just to tell me she had to leave,
Draw past the markets where the fish are sun-dried,
Snarled by the coral-rough hands of divers deep.
My mother the sea,
She left her running tab
Of the grocer’s choicest greens,
Thumbed the velamentous rinds and spiny scarola,
Her xylem and phloem are the slow moving cruciferousness of a breeze.
My mother the sea,
Charwoman of tides,
Who dips and delves upon her knees,
Who scrubs her brothel-coves with chamber lye,
Cyprian mistress of the salt-stained sheets.
I have looked for you, mother,
A scugnizzo amid the striped awnings of the marketplace
~ like sails to the sky ~
Where the fishmongers hawk their pride
Of conch, cavallo, and black sea bream.
I have looked for you, mother,
Walked sun-forged along the boardwalk,
Amid the neon-mascara of signs,
Hand-in-hand with only the ladyfingers of salt and vinegar fries,
Toward the crisp syllabub of pebbles and sand.
A beach is window-warmth spread free, cosmopolitan,
The longeur of eyes crushed in the glass-dust of cities.
And in the sputtering of the frosted spume of tides,
Held broken seashells in my hands like broken needles,
Heard the pump-click of the ventilator through your mask of sand.
My mother the sea,
A naked convalescent,
Whose ever-turnings have taken
A turn for the worse.
Who will know her by her death, who but me?
Jan 21, 2025
Jan 21, 2025 at 8:29 AM UTC
I hail a cab. I’ve got to leave this part
of town, the Upper West,
dripping with fatty money.
At 97th I step in
and exhale, revived
by the sweating air in taxi cabs.
Through the window
I see
the imposing orange
of a tall
sewer ventilator,
steaming and
ignored—
At Columbus Circle,
a corner hot-
dog stand
is slow-
ly wheeled to
its moment-
ary place—
Broadway, with
one closed bank.
Empty, in back
the dusted black,
and iron beams?
Things lean
diagonal
against the walls,
a warning—
Faster, faster,
further south and somewhere
in the Village.
The rows,
rows and rows
of brownstone stoops:
quietly lined
along the street
patient, waiting,
delightfully clean—
The cab rolls to a stop. I pay and step out to the street.
Near Greenwich Street, the crosswalk
supports some types trying so hard
not to be doing all that much
and wearing hip clothes.
I’ll stop mid-street, look up real high,
and take in the sunlight
that’s slamming against the pavement.
Feb 6, 2010
Feb 6, 2010 at 10:22 AM UTC
up at your regularly scheduled night sky patrol,
the colorful clock says 2:47 and
dark skies confirm which 2:47 it is,
for flecks of blackened peppery light exude at this hour,
a time period for former lovers, those old writes enfolded, enveloped,
hiding an active poem volcano spewing bare feet words in clouds of
kidskin soft velveteen cumulus, fleece-comforting slippers of poems
there are half started poems waiting, more than one, triplets in fact,
waiting to be born in the time of pandemic, thinking quietly,
will they emerge healthy and living and grow up to be adults
contributing to society, additives to the engine oil of human living
but the old familiar, dissatisfaction with quality control leaves them
unfinished, poet lurches from dead roses head hanging, a new blues,
disease as an economic and societal differentiation, that you hope,
believe, poems that in due course, all will emerge, for better or for worse,
poetry birthed in the time of pandemic
the city of new york, where I was birthed and will die, a city of
tall buildings, tall tales, short attention spans there is but one nighttime moving automobile observed in a city that never sleeps but now hides blanketed in weariness of trepidation of what are the
well known unknown possibilities in the time of pandemic
and you wonder in this new, different quietude if poems can be born
with birth defects and survive, breathing on a ventilator till they can
breathe by their own lungs, or were they perma-infected on a supermarket trip, a walk by the East River, a pizza delivery man, even
if inspired by a decade-lover, next, in bed, in the time of pandemic
waving to grandchildren in their second story window, you on the street, keeping them safe from you, a modern Auschwitz train station where they separated, the we-useless out, children and their parents, safe in a barbed wire atmosphere, a demarcated world, where some billion of brimming droplets of tears are stillborn
stillborn poems, or perhaps just poems-in-waiting, to still be
born in a time of pandemic
3:29am Sunday March 22, Twenty Twenty
New York City, the epicenter, crossroads
Mar 22, 2020
Mar 22, 2020 at 3:55 AM UTC
I'm tired of my heart being a yoyo.
I've tried to tell you that you're my ventilator,
but you're never here.
I'm the type of lover that wants to leave everything else behind,
maybe it's because I'm a sucker for a good sunset.
I just want to live somnolently,
I want to retrace the veins that map your wrist.
I want you to be here.
Apr 21, 2015
Apr 21, 2015 at 11:12 PM UTC
*i vent, i'm sure you heard of the invention known as the ventilator... it's like a lung-clone-subservient of a "nanny quality" of automating the words: breathe in... breathe out... breathe in... it precursors the in and outsources the *out, there's a cult-like-scheme involving the use of... the stated tools... worthy of a suggestion that epitomises August as the month of harvest - i.e. the sun finally sets to auburn crops and **** me, isn't the bread rightly puffy?! toad-squidgy aye aye? go on, give us a burping caricature of a squeeze!*
imagine uttering the words:
i hope your mother lies
eternally run-sacked with hopes
of former ****** glory,
***** bleeding,
as if a Mongolian horde just passed
her with a glorious encore of
clapping to match...
because that's what i assert
as been done to my mother,
you don't even understand the verb
or adjective or conjunction behind
the noun.... after all, you're an African
Muslim and a pyramid builder,
a *******
jaded jock-strap and gag's
worth of you the Ben & Jerry...
praise the Koran
but don't understand that behind
each noun there's a collective grammatical
structure, **** you English political correctness,
**** you! **** YOU! have your Reagent's Street
and Oxford Street, have 'em!
behind the noun all grammatical categories
follow suite... universal noun, what category
for the particular? ape transforms into apish,
or Quasimodo or ~ape, nouns are units,
like centimetres, forget the other things, unless you:
let the shoppers drop dead like flies!
but imagine saying the words:
i hope your mother gets gang-raped by
an equivalent of a Mongolian horde;
yep, Mongolian necrophilia.
you said it to my mother, and i'm mourning,
alive, and counting.... once more... so **** you*!
Jun 15, 2016
Jun 15, 2016 at 2:02 PM UTC
alcohol and *******
and ****** off at his wife
he chose to jump out of a sled
and land on his head
his christmas present to himself
now he’s tethered to a ventilator
with a bolt in his brain
his intracranial pressure
is scaling mt. everest
that there santa’s elf
is the textbook definition
of ******* up
Dec 26, 2018
Dec 26, 2018 at 10:17 AM UTC
My favorite music is the tune that I hear playing off at the hospital, when a COVID 19 patient is off the ventilator!
This music is:
A song of a new dawn,
A journey to the future,
A melody of new life,
A symphony of hope, and
The rebirth of the universe!
Hussein Dekmak
Oct 8, 2020
Oct 8, 2020 at 9:12 PM UTC
It could be the cold outside
Empty chairs
TV crime stories
The buzz of ventilator
Mixed with silent humming of the characters
Silence and quietness
Among indecipherable voices
Meditation over a beer glass
Smoking ceremony
Cynicism unspoken
Listening to your breath
Second beer unfinished
Being restless from the absence of fear
Unable to catch one’s line of thoughts
Emotions uncertain
Not an easy day - troubled father
Only scattered images like
Frozen grass
Sticking out of
Icy snow
Who will ever paint it all
In one frame?
Feb 5, 2017
Feb 5, 2017 at 4:10 PM UTC
Between conjecture and classification there is
observation, experiment, data (collection and analysis),
statistics, calculus, and a good guess
about God's intentions -- probabilities, fractals, chaos and complexity.
This is the thunderous city.
The form of the poem, the rhyme.
*Form cannot be first if you want to reach high artistic levels, since
you are then bound by form, and that form is very often a
betrayal of reality*.
Yet I find I am attracted all the time
to philosophies in short skirts, jewels and eyes lined with kohl.
I love where her legs lead, to her very soul.
Three women hike by under an umbrella in a winter rain. Two men
side by side run in rhythm.
An oil truck takes the hill in low steady gear.
My old Marine, 89, died last night without anxiety or fear.
May I overcome my pain enough to reach the place where the deer
lay down their bones
and, like them, die alone.
When making an axe handle, the pattern is not far off.
The purpose of school is to introduce us to the world's innumerable
wonders.
The periodic table, World Wars I and II, Huckleberry Finn and Jim.
But soft,
what light through yonder window breaks?
It is a billion trillion nuclear detonations per second without which
nothing can be done or faked.
The temple bell stops, but the sound still comes out of the
flowers.
Forests and the composite species will be nameless. Genetic
prowess,
receiving the sacrament, performing Lohengrin from the Great
American Songbook,
the look of love in all the wrong places, facebook,
fakebooks, folios of old family photos on or in pianos.
When we took Pop-Pop off the ventilator,
we put him in a refrigerator.
He stopped eating, he stopped breathing. Circle with a dot.
He had his dream, he'd rowed his boat.
Later came organic computers using polymerase and qubits.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 6:05 PM UTC
He is on ventilator
I am at the window
He is in hospital
Close to the grave
I am in hostel
Close to the college
I am opening book
He is closing bible
He is breathing out
I am breathing in
His ventilator is shut
My window is opened
He is eighty
I am eighteen
He is diseased
I am besieged
He lost ground
I am gaining ground
He is my grandfather
Who led a grand life
I am his grandson
Left to lead a branded life
Dec 3, 2014
Dec 3, 2014 at 6:52 PM UTC
A black man struggling to breathe,
A Yemeni child searching for a safe place,
A Palestinian man struggling to be free,
An African villager dreaming of clean drinking water!
A lonely man longing for company,
A homeless person dreaming of shelter,
A hungry child craving a home cooked meal,
An orphan yearning for a mother’s touch!
A disabled person dreaming about walking,
An elderly man wishing to visit his loved ones,
A sick patient praying to be free from the pain,
A COVID 19 patient wanting to get off the ventilator!
Sending love and a prayer to those who have such beautiful dreams.
Hussein Dekmak
Jun 20, 2020
Jun 20, 2020 at 10:08 AM UTC
I used to babble to you about every fear and insecurity.
You used to remind me to "just breathe"
And now, I've been holding my breath for far too long.
Lungs can only be so strong.
What's funny is I used to be used to being alone.
I used to be able to breathe on my own.
But you became a sort of personal ventilator.
It feels as if I'm riding an escalator that only goes down.
And I don't know how I'll make it without you around.
I became dependent on you.
And as descendants of not so great relatives.
You're my only family who dwells in a corner of my heart.
You Calling me family was a start but I can think of many things thicker than blood.
Like the thick sound of heartbreak when you fall to your knees with a thud. Or the thickness of the air that's filled my lungs since
You told me you didn't love me. don't you get how badly that stung?
Now do you understand the reasoning behind how tightly I clung?
I'm so tired of being alone. All that I want is just to go home but home was in your arms and it's winter and I'm afraid you would no longer keep me warm.
Stop saying you love me, Your "love's" in the wrong form.
© copyrighted Nicole Ann Osborn
Dec 8, 2014
Dec 8, 2014 at 11:45 PM UTC
I
*Oh life, you unfulfilled *******
All seeing eye of admonition,
You unfair precinct of justice,
You incredulously cruel myth,
Oh, How I hate you
Oh, How I want to leave you
Oh, How I love your counterpart more,
Death.
She seems easy and trouble free.
An impenetrable kingdom of night.
I wish I could fade into oblivion sometimes.*
II
*I'm three year strong of my grand depression.
It's not always there now,
but it is.
And so am I.
And so are you.
And so is my lacuna,
my friend,
who invivorogated my sense of purpose,
who gave me a reason to live.
She has been
My net I fall onto everytime
you push me down from the trapeze act of my passions.
The medicine that nurses my wounds when you leave me bleeding.
My ventilator as my soul was dying a slow sad death.
When you **** all my hope away
she plants it back again deep in my heart
impervious to your morbid touch
tightly sealed with her warm kiss.
I am scared to be happy because of you,
because every time I am happy
you decide to give me a new **** reason
to be ineffably sad.
You know where it hurts me the most
which parts of me, is most tender and vulnerable,
you know my weaknesses
you use it against me like an old friend who is now an enemy.
Why can't you just let me be ?
I'm tired, so **** tired.
It's alright.
I have my love,
and I'll make it through the day
and spit in your apathetic face.
I ******* hate you,
though you are beautiful okay.*
May 20, 2016
May 20, 2016 at 11:47 PM UTC
the work of breathing exceeds my ability.
i think i smoked a little too much.
it doesnt feel like thats it.
i think its our hostility.
no...
its just
Seven-Hundred-And-Sixty Millimeters of Mercury
Dec 16, 2014
Dec 16, 2014 at 12:23 AM UTC