Preoccupations

And so, repeated jibes concuss us

In Flushing Queens my 11th year.

First death threats and grim teasers in the living room following the breakdown:

the bugbear of embezzling in a newsstand business, framed as the be-all for disintegration

Picking winners in four consecutive horse races finance the first hospitalization

And what isn’t tried throughout this life:

Thorazine for schizophrenics — let us give it a go with the newish depressive (and Elavil, Mellaril, Tofranil, Librium)

And talk therapy, talk talk, tawk therapy

And special diets and improvised tweaks

And co-ed hospital ward stays — women with eating disorders bunking with lassoed men

And shock therapy, as execrable rite and favored go-to

And analyses with unemployable neurologists who pivoted years ago to psychiatry at tony hospitals

And Creedmoor State’s creaking gates in Queens — two long confinements

And New York Hospital with more harnessed shocking

Then, abandon the experiments: deposit him at Veterans Administration hospitals in Manhattan and Tarrytown, with war relics and assorted nostrums —

jumble, jumble, home furlough, now and less again

Also throw in the ordinary stuff: “saved from a deepening melanoma”

Estrangement from the holiday cousins and friends ensues —

Though next-door neighbors got to know us through the row house walls

Call this clinical depression or breakthrough narcissism blathering at the country: there is no cure —only curiosity and gawking and thumby containment

No one looking elected our ineluctable one to high office.

What now for this indulgent nation — teased by the brass one who gnawed and pawed at family members, companies, groomers, contractors, women, and customers, while most of us over steeped in our own crazy lies and lives?

Stay crazy or growling off-stage, exorbitant ones.

Keep yourself within family or neighborhoods or estates.

The world needs leaders, not bleeders without boundaries.