POEMS
At Urgent Care
You wouldn’t think the man
in the Stay Back t-shirt
and dark leather hat
speared with a pheasant feather
probably picked up in some scrub
a few decades ago would care
what anyone thinks of what
he’s got on his head or
any of his other life choices
yet when the triage nurse,
scanning his vitals, says,
Nice hat, sir, he says,
My wife hates it—
and you see he’s just yearning
to be seen like the rest of us
here in this place no one wants to be
so you almost say you like it, too,
but you don’t want
to gang up on the wife who
might not really hate the hat,
who might see him, and love him,
urgently, in fact—hat and all.
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