"I’m ensconced in the system."
He was getting paid quite well to do his job in the healthcare sector, but he had internal conflict about how the system worked.
He asked me, "Did you know that about 50% of healthcare dollars are spent on the last six months of life?"
He felt uneasy about blasting people with treatments at the end when the odds were extremely against them. Most of the time, it only gave them false hope and lowered their quality of life for the time they had left.
It also seemed to him that the government money put into these extremely expensive treatments could be much better allocated to educational or environmental endeavours.
Listener Poet Beck Klassen
June 2019
I Pour Feverishly
I’m watching myself pour soil
Into a sinkhole
In the middle of a garden
(Suffocating the plants a bit
In trying to save them)
Others watch me too
Flowers at the edge tumble in
Fasterandfaster
I pour feverishly
Cultivating nothing but the others’ hope
The browning plants fall
Until nothing is left
But the resonance of our overblown hopefulness
As it too dies
The garden next to us
Doomed to wilt
(We’ve forgotten to water that one.)
