November 2017
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
wexelblatt@verizon.net
I live near Boston and teach at Boston University. Besides academic pieces, I write fiction when I’m up to it and poems when I can’t help it. I use a fountain pen—my link to tradition—and usually write to music. I’ve published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals. My most recent book is Petites Suites.
Waiting Rooms
Aren’t they all the same?
Everyone together, yet not;
everybody wanting in, or out?
Can to wait be an active verb
when it’s so crushingly passive?
Is it more like to be or to scream?
Some waiting to be taken, others for them
to be sprung so they can hightail it.
Anticipation’s braised to incarceration.
Televisions you can’t turn off.
Magazines you can’t read.
Germy toys in the Kiddie Korner.
At the vet’s the schnauzer whimpers,
getting a big whiff of euthanasia.
In the dentist’s you worry what they’ll find.
At the lawyer’s it’s the price of time
plus the sadness of settlements and her
joke sign: How Much Justice Can You Afford?
The DMV’s all waiting room, all the time.
In the Social Security Office nothing gets
cleared up and sugared children test limits.
Waiting for the principal, the loan officer,
the auto repairman, the HR hatchet,
the end of the endoscopy, the biopsy result.
After four hours of bearing witness even
the Emergency Room traumas turn routine.
Waiting for help, waiting for the bad news.
Walls with corporate art, models sprawled across
Harleys, misty landscapes that never soothe,
all the horrid, hard, but matching chairs,
the empty water coolers, coffeemakers
on the fritz, the impregnable receptionists,
the psychiatrists’ overthought décor
and the still air, thickened by anxiety,
rotting into rancid ennui where life feels
suspended but could be in the balance.
Dante thought up a vestibule neither in nor out
of Hell, a space set apart for those who
lose their intellect’s good, who take no sides,
earning no infamy and meriting no praise.
Beside these, eternally stranded in that infernal
sala d’attesa, even a sinner might feel proud.
Waiting Rooms
Aren’t they all the same?
Everyone together, yet not;
everybody wanting in, or out?
Can to wait be an active verb
when it’s so crushingly passive?
Is it more like to be or to scream?
Some waiting to be taken, others for them
to be sprung so they can hightail it.
Anticipation’s braised to incarceration.
Televisions you can’t turn off.
Magazines you can’t read.
Germy toys in the Kiddie Korner.
At the vet’s the schnauzer whimpers,
getting a big whiff of euthanasia.
In the dentist’s you worry what they’ll find.
At the lawyer’s it’s the price of time
plus the sadness of settlements and her
joke sign: How Much Justice Can You Afford?
The DMV’s all waiting room, all the time.
In the Social Security Office nothing gets
cleared up and sugared children test limits.
Waiting for the principal, the loan officer,
the auto repairman, the HR hatchet,
the end of the endoscopy, the biopsy result.
After four hours of bearing witness even
the Emergency Room traumas turn routine.
Waiting for help, waiting for the bad news.
Walls with corporate art, models sprawled across
Harleys, misty landscapes that never soothe,
all the horrid, hard, but matching chairs,
the empty water coolers, coffeemakers
on the fritz, the impregnable receptionists,
the psychiatrists’ overthought décor
and the still air, thickened by anxiety,
rotting into rancid ennui where life feels
suspended but could be in the balance.
Dante thought up a vestibule neither in nor out
of Hell, a space set apart for those who
lose their intellect’s good, who take no sides,
earning no infamy and meriting no praise.
Beside these, eternally stranded in that infernal
sala d’attesa, even a sinner might feel proud.
“Waiting Rooms” first appeared in Autumn Sky Daily
© 2017 Robert Wexelblatt
© 2017 Robert Wexelblatt
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