The Needs of the Many

1. EXAM
Anyone who needs to see a doctor, please
stand in this line. Anyone who needs to hear
a doctor, please stand in this other line.

If you wish to feel a doctor without otherwise
engaging, remain calm, the doctor is with you.
If you dream of doctors, please wait outside

until your name is almost called. If you dream
you’re a bird, please wait inside until your call
is named. If you believe the word Doctor

is a verb, run away, run away. If you believe
doctors live in white houses over white lawns
in neighborhoods of sky, please form two lines:

one on this side of the fountain,
one on this side of the fountain.

Anyone newly born or elderly, please keep to
the middle of the group. If you don’t know why
you’re here, think no one sees you, that you can
hide by falling into line,
you have already been seen.

2. THE NEEDS OF THE MANY
On the days when we wept—
and they were many—we did it
over the sound of a television
or radio, or the many engines
of the sky. It was rarely so quiet
we could hear just our sadness,
the smallness of it
that is merely the sound of wind
and water between the many pages
of the lungs. Many afternoons
we left the house still crying
and drove to a café or the movies,
or back to the hospital where we sat
dumb under the many eyes
of Paul Klee. There were many
umbrellas, days when it refused
to rain, cups of tea ignored. We
washed them all in the sink,
dry eyed. It’s been a while,
we’re cried out. We collect pauses
and have taken to reading actual
books again. We go through them
like yellow lights, like tunnels
or reunions, we forget which;
the older you are the more similes,
the more pangs per hour. Indeed,
this is how we break one hour into
many, how healing wounds time
in return. And though we know
there will always be crying to do,
just as there’s always that song,
always a leaf somewhere in the car,
this may be the only sweetness left,
to have a few griefs we cherish
against the others, which are many.

3. TEN ALTERNATIVES TO DIAGNOSIS
1. Tell lies while jumping rope

2. Sleep on a queen-sized photograph of an orchestra

3. Read your resume to a dog

4. Descend stairs in place

5. Fill your pockets with seawater & walk into a quarry

6. Pay someone to gift-wrap the rest of your money

7. Have your mail forwarded to an orphanage

8. Learn to read Braille with your cheek

9. Applaud the progress of shadows

10. Set your watch to the hour of your birth & remove the battery

-Brendan Constantine
© 2016 Brendan Constantine, from the book Dementia, My Darling (Red Hen Press). Used with
permission.