I Pour Feverishly

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"I’m ensconced in the system."

He was getting paid quite well to do his job in the healthcare sector, but he had internal conflict about how the system worked.

He asked me, "Did you know that about 50% of healthcare dollars are spent on the last six months of life?"

He felt uneasy about blasting people with treatments at the end when the odds were extremely against them. Most of the time, it only gave them false hope and lowered their quality of life for the time they had left.

It also seemed to him that the government money put into these extremely expensive treatments could be much better allocated to educational or environmental endeavours.

Listener Poet Beck Klassen

Erie Shores HealthCare

June 2019

I’m watching myself pour soil

Into a sinkhole

In the middle of a garden

(Suffocating the plants a bit

In trying to save them)

Others watch me too

Flowers at the edge tumble in

Fasterandfaster

I pour feverishly

Cultivating nothing but the others’ hope

The browning plants fall

Until nothing is left

But the resonance of our overblown hopefulness

As it too dies

The garden next to us

Doomed to wilt

(We’ve forgotten to water that one.)

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