Poetry

After he juggles three chainsaws and spins twenty plates balanced on sticks, he moves to the grand finale: ten Bowler hats tossed across the arena and stacked on the ringmaster’s head.

When's your teed off time?

We wrote through the night, between moonlight and morning, admissions and discharges, wrote when phones stopped ringing, when pagers stopped paging. We were raw, opening ourselves to chaos and mystery...

Funny how fast we become prisoners with lost convictions as we fill out the forms, patients getting sicker while they wait.

My doctor-wife squeezes her needle-nose tweezers and lifts the tiny knots high enough to snip with surgical scissors...

Please! No more group hugs!

Our time was Thursday, 5 o’clock, my psychiatrist’s door always opened wide, him wearing a wool sweater, sipping tea, lights dimmed to an endless twilight...

There was combat in Nam and I let my hair grow long, went to college, studied orgo until I became draft exempt...

When the soloist lowers her Strad and takes a bow, she reveals the violin’s mark on her throat, which makes me think of Mozart...

Monday, July 1st...Twenty-two new residents...All with perfect teeth...

I was surfing a long board out past the place where you can still smell Coppertone when a ten foot wave smashed me down into darkness...

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to fight.

People with mood disorders (and those who care about them) are likely to experience a healing reconsideration of their own experiences as they read this book.

Med school finals, ten backpack pounds of biochem hauled for months, my epiphany: I would never know more about glucose metabolism than that morning...

Poor Sigmund. Mrs. Freud gave him the slip.

Introduce yourself, shake hands, sit down. Always sit down. Then ask for permission...

Creativity should not be seen as “optional” in psychiatry. Rather, it helps us to approach clinical problems in new ways.

"If I only had a heart."

At three breaths before death a blue latex hand pulls out a trach tube, a blade skims over the zipped up hole, and droplets of blood are sucked into skin...

We teach every intern how to find the place where they can lay down a silver stethoscope and listen to everything...

After your exams, after your diploma, after all the nights on call, missed dinners and diagnoses, after your apologies...

Bolted to the bedroom loft, twenty feet high with lacquered sides and honey colored risers polished with pine-scented wax-these are the rungs I climb to the feather bed, candle, and bottle of red wine...

Sleepless in New Haven, I read this hotel room’s only other book. Power-suited lawyers on the back cover advertise to sue for antidepressant suicides if families will call 1-800-BAD-MEDS...

Almost everyone can benefit from psychotherapy at some point in their lives.

He wrote that he didn’t know what to say to comfort us, so he decided to describe the view from his rented room near Sydney...

Half price T-shirts and ice cream cones, no more tomatoes or New York Times, people out patching the roof, putting up storms, the last guests gone tomorrow.

Is the hippo [campus] an endangered species?

I’m happy to be off the trail, out of the wind and salt spray, safe from the fog’s cold claw...

I’m glad we’re studying this one, a lusty, almost immortal guy living in his dark tunnels of love.

He didn’t notice snow falling in the Krankenhaus courtyard the night he fell in love. A mere intern, castrated by Jew-hating med school professors...