After a managed care company
calls me to be “a prescriber,”
I recall The Book of Dinosaurs
my grandfather gave me the day
I turned seven. One hundred million
years passed with the turn of a page,
T. Rex ruling, then suddenly extinct,
the world growing colder and colder
until the final painting of an Ice Age
night, a saber-tooth tiger roaring
from a cliff, our troglodyte ancestors
in a field below, clubbing
each other to death, battling
for power and turf, me in my office
waging my own little war, wondering
what on earth is worth dying for.
