[Jan D. Hodge]

Or Byron's epitaph for Castlereagh:

Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.

[RCL]

You think you're depressed?

This one's off to the funny papers!

[Aaron Novick]

Poem on reading an old thread

So many Posters who once Posted
are vanished—permabanned or ghosted;
the small remainder—once such friends—
Post now with heads lodged in their ends.

[Quincy Lehr]

The poem at the top is lots of fun,
considering that the good guys won.

[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

I have just realised that this thread is really old (sorry). But it felt like an evening for making quickfire images without worrying about quality, so here's my depressing poem anyway:

[Jim Moonan]

.
Sarah Jane, works for me : ) Gazing down and out at the sea at night from the railing of a boat always sinks me... (Sometimes I ride the night ferry from Nantucket to Cape Cod.)

This thread is back on the radar screen so I quickly wrote this:


Died again today. Twice.
Yesterday too. Black ice
hole comes to get you.
No tomorrow never comes.
.
.

[Mario Pita]

Mind Chasm


When life looks drained of meaning it once had
and emptied of the joys that filled it once
and hollowed of its good to leave just bad,
and I who felt so wise turned out a dunce;
When flesh feels stripped of soul and left a shell,
and memories are scraped as residue
of back when life felt scrumptious for a spell,
I wonder, feeling barren, what to do.
Like aging eyes see less well, so my brain’s
a culprit as its vision has turned blurred,
so lofty feelings that had poured like rains
dried up, and I feel like a flightless bird.
It seems to be a punishment for sin.
The doctor, though, says, “Take your medicine.”

[Julie Steiner]

Marfan Syndrome Blues

“With careful management,” the pamphlet cheers,
“most Marfanoids now live past forty years.”
I’m forty-five. Just lucky, it appears.

One blissful hour ago, I had no clue
my death was half a decade overdue.
And now I know I’ve cursed my children, too.

A verse of Larkin’s writhes within my head,
throwing sparks, the way my wayward thread
of DNA will zap my daughters dead.

Lightning-strikes of stretch-marks brand them mine.
They’ve both received my thunderbolt of spine
(a back-and-forth-and-sideways serpentine),

the jaw I can dislocate like a snake,
and limbs so hyper-flexible, they make
the double-jointed do a double take.

I gave my girls my maloccluded grin;
my skeletal demeanor, long and thin;
arachnodactyly; transparent skin;

and now, I’ve learned, perhaps a fatal flaw
in the aorta. Even with my jaw
unhinged, the news is sticking in my craw.

Why has no one spotted this before?
Among the three of us, we’ve seen a score
of specialists. Today’s was just one more,

who’s broken what our camelbacks entail,
and said the woes we’d thought were weasel-scale
amount to something very like a whale.

~~~~~

When I throw a self-pity party, I do a thorough job, don't I?

Turns out we don't have Marfan Syndrome. It's Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Hooray for easily-disjointed limbs and for chronic, debilitating pain, rather than our aortas ripping at an inopportune moment and killing us within about four minutes. But I didn't know that when I wrote this seven years ago, shortly after my elder daughter's heart transplant (for a different set of genetic defects), when I finally had time to focus on my younger daughter's somewhat less catastrophic medical weirdnesses, some of which I seem to have given to both of them.

The poem alludes to Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” (which begins, “They fuck you up, your mom and dad. / They do not mean to, but they do.”), and also to this passage of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale?
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.

[Mario Pita]

I'm sorry your family is going through this and hope that you will all leave the doctors with jaws agape in awe at how you all avoid all but the mildest symptoms throughout your lengthy, healthy lives.

[Julie Steiner]

I WIN! I WIN!

I mean, thanks, Mario! Your good wishes are much appreciated.

Update: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome in the news.