Alone

I wasn't alone

when I woke from five hours
of brain surgery. A nurse was there.
My wife, who'd waited all that time,
visited. And monitoring machines
blinked and sighed. I was lucky.

In the cold fog
of painkillers and an assaulted
brain, though, I felt
an aloneness all of us will feel
some time--a rude fact
of our existence. Right now

there are people buried
under bombed rubble
who feel absolutely alone.

I vomited regularly
for a whole day, casting
not much but bile into
plastic green bags.
My body thinks anesthesia
poison. (A lucky guess.)
That kept me distracted.

Still: that chill, that
psychic dungeon, that sense
of you, a cold infinity
of matter, and nothing else.

hans ostrom 2023

Alone

I wasn't alone

when I woke from five hours

of brain surgery. A nurse was there.

My wife, who'd waited all that time,

visited. And monitoring machines

blinked and sighed. I was lucky.

In the cold fog

of painkillers and an assaulted

brain, though, I felt

an aloneness all of us will feel

some time--a rude fact

of our existence. Right now

there are people buried 

under bombed rubble 

who feel absolutely alone.

I vomited regularly

for a whole day, casting

not much but bile into

plastic green bags.

My body thinks anesthesia

poison. (A lucky guess.)

That kept me distracted.

Still: that chill, that

psychic dungeon, that sense

of {you}, a cold infinity

of matter, and nothing else. 

Interruptions

You're a minor Beat Movement poet

in 1961, and you get up to leave a bar
in Berkeley, California, but the bartender
doesn't know who you are, and he yells,
"You forgot to pay!"

No doubt you're not a minor Beat Movement
poet, and it's 2023 or 2122, and you lift
a first spoon of homemade soup
toward your mouth, but someone
raps on your door like a monstrous
woodpecker on a beetle-infested pine.

You're anybody somewhere sometime,
soaring in new love but now brought down
to sickening earth by the buckshot of
betrayal. Or required brain surgery
shunts your rolling-along-all-right life
to a rusty side-track where
you live in a fog of recovery.

Yep, life's a series of interruptions
interrupted by Death. Sometimes
the shock is so great you and your
family have to become refugees,
who huddle and pray on a rubber
boat slammed by cold waves.

hans ostrom 2023

Brain Surgery

A squad of technicians, dressed in blue,

arms folded, looks down at me in bed.
The anesthesiologist's potions
put me fast under before the surgeon,
Dr. Cho, gains the stage.

In my blank darkness, I don't know
he's drilling a keyhole into my skull,
then sawing a crescent-cut. Then it's
on to slicing into the brain, shoving muscles
aside, and peering in to find the Culprit:

a manatee-fat artery stalks the trigeminal
nerve from neck to jaw, lying on it
like Jabba the Hutt. The t.g. controls
eye-business, cheek business, taste
and tongue and gum business--much
show business in one facial hemisphere.

Stressed and pressed, it shoots electric-
bolt spasms into cheek or gums, deep
throbs into gums, electric flutters into
eyelashes. Before some minor palliatives
arose, the ailment drew the quaint nickname,
"the suicide disease."

In this case, the smitten artery
never gives up. Dr. Cho, pugnacious
neurosurgeon, begs to differ. He tracks
the obese entity like Kit Carson, slipping
Teflon pillows under it so that it may
lounge ineffectually, thus liberating
Mademoiselle Trigeminal Nerve.

Scheduled for 3 hours, the surgery
goes six. Awake, I'm bashed and bushed
(tell that to Cho!). Now, recovery: cautions,
gentle rainstorms of brightly colored pills,
sleeping upright (Dear Lord Give me Strength),
trying to hide from my loving, effective,
but Jesuitical wife, watching the brain
recalibrate and reboot. Suddenly I have
a Tom Waits voice and must eat in tiny
garden-party morsels. But: no pain.

I must add that a Black nurse
absently stroked my forearm
before the dance began. It was a task,
but she did it. I squeezed her fingers.
Empathy, the original medicine.

hans ostrom 2023