Poetry

For those fleeting months in winter
You held me so close
That my heart almost burst
From the possibility of it all
And I went about everyday
Happy and warmed
By making our new life together

But as summer has come
Between us something
Has grown cold
And I sit alone most times
Shivering and tearful
Longing to fix it
So we are warm together again

You and I are the kind of lovers
Who like to push at the edge?
In the open?

I stand in wonder with you
Looking over the cliff
Wondering when
Wondering if
If we could kill this

And yet the abyss calls us
Me to submission
You to public ecstasy

All is fair in our bed
I would declare it is undefiled
In our lovers bed

What better way to heal
Than in our blankets
I find you safe and warm
Undefiled

I live to defy everything
The past the future
Gravity pulls me downward
But I wrestle
To move upward

Gravity gives peace no leave
I gaze up to you
Face to face
I defy what would tear us apart

I place my mouth next to yours
Breath in as you breath out
I can float content
Gravity will have no sway here

Only what we love
Only what we hope
Moves between us
More prevailing than gravity

Originally posted by M.G. DeQuincy Hall

During my workday I learned searchers had found the body of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis in North Carolina, and I’d planned to opine about a mother who would sell her child into prostitution, the monster that would buy her and the sickening pervert eventually responsible for killing her.

Querying news sites to get more information about that case, I happened to see an article about how uninsured patients visiting our nation’s emergency rooms were twice (yes, two times) as likely to die as their counterparts with insurance.

Long ago in the early nineties, Public Enemy alerted us all that something was amiss, as Flavor Flav intoned that 911 was “a joke.” Ice Cube walked us through an excursion to the L.A. County hospital where negroes, “die over a little scratch.”

On our journey growing up in Seattle, we have all heard or talked about the fear involved with a trip to Harborview Medical Center, lest we not make the return trip home, even as it has been touted as the region’s best trauma center. I have always been of the mind that even if the uninsured (read: poor) did not have access to, and therefore did not receive adequate or regular preventative care like annual physicals, necessary medications, etc., we would all be on a level playing field when it came to emergency treatment when we were in need after car accidents, falls, shootings and the like. Apparently I was wrong.

Very interesting that researchers from Harvard University looked at information on almost 700,000 patients from 900 hospitals across the nation during a period from 2002 through 2006 and concluded that the ER death rate for those with insurance had a death rate of 3.3 percent compared with 5.7 percent for the uninsured.

Enigmatically enough, the study was not able to identify the reasons (there are several possible theories), the numbers are clear, frightening and not all that different than what we all in the city have suspected if not known for generations; if you’re poor, stay out of the hospital-it may not be the best place for you.

Since President Obama rode into the White House amidst a promise to reform health care in the U.S, among other things. That reform bill has been passed in the house and is now being debated in the senate. In earlier stages, conservatives tried to derail reform by claiming President Light Brown and his cohorts were trying to push death panels onto the elderly. That clearly was not the case, but these numbers have me wondering if our public hospitals have not been staffed with death squads. Until this whole reform thing is resolved in congress, I would advise whether insured or not that you use a little more caution when driving, and if you hear gunshots–duck.
-DQ

Just as my divorce
became final
I was sure
all the doors
in my life
CLOSED

There came to me
In this land
New men
New life
New possibility
OPENING DOORS

Wild winds you blow hard
In my soul
Even when the distance
Separates
Severs
Us apart

My greatest fear
Is how I will long for you
When our time has passed

How dedicated you are
To turning
My life
Upside down
And inside out.

What if only time will tell?
And there is no time to be had
Seconds in stasis are tantamount to death

The consequences of every step
Forward, backward, inward
To feel you sleep between my legs

So quickly after loving me
Descending so deeply into the warmth
Of my mouth
Soft exhalation against my neck

I don’t even see your eyes flutter
As you rise to thrust me open again

Eons when your are inside of me
Are indistinguishable from one moment
To the next
Forward, backward, inward

Am I the same place to go?
To forget with a different face.

Or could I be like your perfect rain?
Simply complex like this home of ours
Wet welcoming city of green

Could you be my faultless tree?
Tall and true that protect the boundaries
Of this emerald on the coast

What if only time will tell?
Forward, backward, inward

Was there really life before mms tech support

Cheryl Diane Novak
Was here
And then she changed to
Cheryl Diane Dinkins
But Mr Dinkins loves Paula now
But before that
Cheryl Diane Dinkins
Changed to
Jumapili Alili Dikeledi Ikuseghan-Dinkins
But it didn’t matter because she was still
Cheryl Diane Novak
And then she became
Jumapili Alili Dikeledi Ikuseghan-Dinkins-Carroll
Then something like
Jumapili Alili Dikeledi Ikuseghan-Dinkins-Carroll-Davis
And on ward to
Jumapili Alili Dikeledi Ikuseghan-Dinkins-Carroll-Davis-Wiles
Though no matter what
She is
Cheryl Diane Novak
And
Today
She is back to Jumapili Alili Dikeledi Ikuseghan-Dinkins
But she doesn’t know how to fix
Cheryl Diane Novak

Jumapili

On the day we were forced to choose
I found myself remembering
The day you put me on the counter
Pushing up my dress
To take your bliss
Entering me
You must have been full of yourself
Pleased to be there
In the two things you loved most
An Army uniform
And entwined in me
I have never before
Nor since
Felt so close to you
So inside your love
Now at the time
When required to sever from you
An order I don’t know how to honor
I find myself groping for that moment