All I Know of Infectious Disease I've Learned From Watching Doc Holliday Die

With more pinned on him
than Judas
aside from tuberculosis
the dentist-turned-gambler
and part-time pistolero

saved or avenged
a few of his friends
through a different sort
of social distancing
with foemen.

When asked if conscience
weighed on his head
he admitted to coughing it up
with his lungs.

No stranger to new normals
he rode again
never noosed by backwoods bedfellows

nixed instead by the consumption
contracted from his mother
in a Georgian childhood
that's mostly disremembered.

Denied a lost shot of whiskey
"This is funny,"
he told a nurse
about dying in bare feet
without holes from bullets.

Heroes don't declare themselves
like politicos in press briefings.
History, Hollywood
and subtle parentheticals
establish whom to hail

but who doesn't like
some afternoon violence?
Who needs a break
from sanitized life?


Currently reading:
"Fighting Handguns" by Jeff Cooper.

Defanged Olympians

My old man'll turn
69 tomorrow
but I can't go see him
to celebrate.
I'm sick
o'discussing the Cause.

The world hides in a chrysalis
thin and gold-rimmed
like Bible paper
hoping to emerge;
Daniel from the lions' den.

If only we were in church
32 years ago.
He'd hand me his pack
of Luden's Throat Drops
(though none of us're ill)
to pass the time

like he got me through sermons
I couldn't understand
in pews I couldn't see over

happy to have
Wild Cherry
or Honey Lemon
unwrapped from wax paper
after an off-key song

but here we are
where no one's singing.

Today I'd settle
for Honey Licorice
or even the devil's candy
Butter Rum Life Savers
from a gray-haired man
who repeats himself--
a hero undeclared

though the sermon
remains the same:

Life's too short
to waste.
Memento mori.
That conversation
like any pair of hands
gets bloody.


Currently reading:
"Desperation" by Stephen King.