Poetry

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.

My penmanship sucks. So does my typing. I’ve been this way since seventh grade...

Looking out at a flat gray sea, I try to imagine the chasms in the ocean’s floor where lava laced with strontium pours...

A poem written by a psychiatrist: "A faith in human kindness lost, abandonment with lasting cost."

I want my patients to believe I consider Peabody’s advice before I see them, that I recognize our shared humanity...

He smoked trabucos, mild miniatures produced by the Austrian monopoly, but preferred Don Pedros and Reina Cubanos...

The lab results came back and here's what the doctor found.

The trouble with looking like a God becomes clear after we learn to wear our mask of omnipotence, pretending to know the answers to questions...

These books almost write themselves.

His new hip healed in, we’re working on a bluff, talking doctors and health care reform as we shove a new propane tank into place...