It takes one-and-a-half hours
to fill one-hundred-and-forty compartments
with one-thousand-two-hundred-and-eighty pills and tablets.
I count, keep counting one by one -
five boxes at a time, each good for a week.
They rattle like gourds when I pick them up.
Sometimes I dance and shake,
sing my idea of Salsa or a shaman's healing chant.
The green-white and yellow-white are for thyroid,
pink, orange and beige control seizures and mood,
the blue - depression, attention deficit,
supplements, herbs and vitamins -
a spectrum of color and purpose.
When I think that I need all these meds and why,
there's a pull in my mind like something is stuck.

The little white pills
that keep me from falling when I stand up
are as white as the smooth
small stones of nitroglycerin
shoved under my tongue in an ER eight years ago.
I went there needing a shot for muscle spasms,
the Resident thought it was a heart attack,
cerebral vessels opened up too much,
blood rushed out of my head, brain cells were strangled.
I had to quit working as a Doctor.
My wife of ten years left when that was made clear.

Among the pieces of me and my life
washed away by that torrent of blood
were places and things that were heavy and rough:
an idea that I had to teach patients, their families,
to heal themselves, but I was the one
who had to make them all well;
a need to be humble and recognized -
a strange sort of arrogance I always denied;
a marriage mostly unkind, and a mean streak that showed
when my feelings were hurt.

Now I write poems every day, do whatever I want,
keep to one woman, stay clean and sober.
People say I'm much nicer. It's true.
The pull is a sadness I put in the boxes of pills,
the loss of the choice to go back:
every day was intense -
a noisy bazaar of feeling, sensation -
all new every moment.
I can't handle intensity now, nor chaos
nor people who want me to fix their pain.
I remember how much I ravished that life,
how much it ravished me.