Reflections from a modern mentor

Reflections from a modern mentor
Inspired by Francisco de Goya's "De Que Mal Morira? (Of What Will He Die?)"

I teach, research, and see patients:

The Holy Trinity

To Paris, Prague, and Amsterdam

I’ve traveled far and wide.

At conferences, I present work

That’s students’ and not mine.

I save the forest for the trees

To focus lens behind

The Third World folks I fly to heal

After it’s photo time.

My anecdotes, I intersperse

With names of famous men

Whose laboratories I’ve traversed

Since tender age of ten.

“TMP/SMX Tx:

IVDU B.E.”

My pearls of wisdom train the new

With slides of PowerPoint.

With just one test, on June 18th

You’ll become just like me.

Unlike that schlub that I once met

In OR #3.

The night an Iranian-American teenager's eyebrow split

A unicorn glances at a mirror

Not in poignant contemplation

But to move it to reveal the horror

Of the prison wall’s indentation

Inside a furtive hoof grasps

What is that sharp object it clasps?

Silencio!  But he hears galloping

So far beyond lamenting lost legacy

Past equine equanimity

Past the profundity of

subversion?

For compliance

He forgets foresight to choreograph chaos

A groove

            A hook

                        A crevice

                                    A wide open space

Vile vestigial coronet cleaved

Now, his head, it feels relieved

A natural force

But for a horse

Is an anachronistic, uncivilized manifestation of identity.

A depressed doctor hangs up his white coat in an empty apartment after a long day

I lost a race today

The striped-shirted man in the corner with a stopwatch told the newspaper

I read about it in bed

He said he watched the clock run indefinitely

Nobody else saw him snickering at my paralysis

He said I didn’t even have the right
Shoes on

I said I didn’t even remember signing up

Nobody asked why

I slept through the awards ceremony

The story said my solipsism was so insatiable

I forgot to file the forms

To not become too big to fail

To eschew a shot of schadenfreude

The same person who said

I am entitled to your mercy

also said

I invest suffering for future returns

She can fly and she can digest cellulose

Acquiescence is

when you lose so much

that you wrap up your oldest possession

put ribbons and bows on it

and try to forget

you know its real origin

A withered old man

I long to become

alone

outdreamed and weak-streamed

with so much peace of mind

even the neighbors can hear the reverberations through my hollow cocoon.