Poetry

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...

Dead into a wall of wind, they cliff jump with parabolic wings curled over pilots cradled in goose down and canvas.

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...

I drive west along the black granite bed of Cold River as it sweeps down the mountain. My best friend drives the same road east, the lies his wife told the judge trailing us...

Laennec was running late when he saw children send sounds through a wooden beam...

When a health system honcho asks me to see his thirty-year-old son “for a little anxiety” I can only agree. He arrives with a girlfriend, the couple dressed like characters from an Armani ad...

"If only I had this, I would feel that."

A penguin? An igloo? A big snowflake? Weigh in on this Rorschach-type image, just for fun.

Tears track his leathered face like seawater spilled from a sinking hull...

Post-holiday hangover? Here are some comical treatments to beat the winter blues.