leaving, take & motherling: fragments from a failed care plan

leaving

 

then this is a treatise on leaving  how

it is inside

but needs to get

 

beyond 

i'm reading a novel on leavings to escape

what is the rest of the world: 700,000 

 

souls departing & 

those who don't believe

the validity of this disease

 

           i'm diseased by fear—

those who are leaving

or on their way—

 

like you, haggard, 

three shirts 

hanging from bony shoulders

 

slamming 

this door

between  

 

+++++++

 

take

 

two. one, if you aren't too bad, too worried. take one with

a dash of turmeric, reduce the inflammation that you

haven't acknowledged festers like the cimarron burn of

anger that caused it; take a second helping if you can't

stand it, slice into the need & bifurcate the longing,  sip

what is left, sobbing inside; take two on those bad days,

when you simper and seethe, when there are pine cones

sticking into places you will not ransom, accidents that

will wait to keep, quickening that will mutter, only in

sleep.

 

+++++++

 

 

motherling:  fragments from a failed care plan

 

subjective

caring that is primal, intrinsic; a malaise of certainty—

straight from the news i obsess over each morning: nurses are being attacked; it is, of course, related to the pandemic, everything is these days. i struggle to comprehend this anger but the despair of it embeds, radiates, transgresses, then infiltrates my soul yet, i know

i should be compassionate;  not understanding feels like a transgression i must interrogate—

how do we care now

objective

timepiece:

the time is morning or maybe afternoon early evening. why i mention time :: the clock demarcates medication schedules. one moment languishes into the next till something needs to be taken. this caring surrounds and enfolds.

diagnoses

we do not make medical diagnoses. no. of course not.

these are nursing diagnoses that delineate the other side of caring, the work of mending: naming that which is intangible and fills the soul.

[a tumbler, with ice chips, at the bedside, can  assuage the oral cavity;  the nurse, who spoons each chip into the patient's mouth can, and will, parse what this means to that person: loss. grieving. frustration. relief]

 

Alteration in Comfort: Pain due to Spiritual Distress

 

back to the soul. which, confounds me. eccymotic, friable, she—the soul— is here then gone, moaning, she is —wait, is that parameter quantifiable and, more importantly, something that can be ameliorated; if so, how? who am I talking about — my patient or, weirdly, me?

Alteration in Nutrition: Less than Body Requirements/more than body requirements

 

draft # 1: meals

can i write a nursing care plan for two fused persons. i am speaking of boundaries, of course. there are none. it is mid-pandemic. we breathe together in need. {care —such a simple, four-letter word that doesn't elucidate what isn't) let me explain again. each meal, meticulous, planned, so they are nurtured, fed, cared for and, by the end of the day, there is no sustenance left for [  ] —how to explicate a relationship, so necessary, that saps one person but feeds another

draft # 2: 60 Watt ready

the other day, on my late-day walk, i stumbled—true, not hyperbole— outside. sunglass-clad. the sun was low, sky almost pink. i hadn't been outside since the same time yesterday, eyes acclimated to 60 Watts when i reached the backyard; the ground, spongy with  feral moss that cossets the ground, pellets from hares, and the doe who visits each evening. i almost step on it—youngling fungi: the mother mushroom is cup-shaped, fluted,  faded  near the periphery; the areola-like center is  blush-brown; nestled beside it, no—supping from its stalk—a fledgling; thriving, health evident even to my unknowing-about-the-health-of-fungi eyes. the motherling gives. and the fledgling takes.