10.6.2025

YOUR ANNUAL MEDICARE WELLNESS VISIT

Photo: Elen Sher

Do you leak urine? List your medications.
How many hours of sleep do you need most nights?

Have you fallen lately? Can you dress yourself?
Do you smoke cigarettes? weed? crushed Adderall?

How would you describe your use of alcohol?
For example, after a night out with friends

do you drop to your knees, not in gratitude
but in spasms of projectile vomiting

from heedlessly mixing the grape with the grain?
from the cold gray drip drip of remembering

your unspeakably vulgar misbehavior
and all those unkind things you said? Do you lie

on bare tile floors because your legs can’t stand you
up? Do you have an advance care directive?

If your heart should stop, would you prefer to die
or let your osteoporotic rib cage

be pulverized in a code-blue clusterfuck
nothing like resuscitations on TV?

Do you have a will? No one is immortal,
though some are rather more mortal than others.

Do you wonder from time to time if the world
would be a better place without you in it?

You could spend a minute with that thought today.

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NOTE: As the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period approaches, what better time to resuscitate this poem from almost two years ago? Here’s a fractured lune, short enough for a tattoo.

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DNR

If my heart should stop—
that’s all, folks.

The end.
Finis.
’Bye.