Triaging "triage"
I find the way words drift & shift in meaning delightful.
Yesterday I checked on the spelling of "triage" in my, admittedly 30 years old, Concise Oxford Dictionary, & found the definition given there was "the refuse of coffee beans."
Since this was nothing like what I was expecting (& started to wonder if I had, in fact, the right word) I moved on to the ten years younger Shorter Oxford & found two definitions; "The action of sorting according to quality" which is much closer to current usage although apparently an older meaning since the second definition was "coffee beans of the third or lowest quality."
& putting them together I came up with a new job, a "triage specialist," who wanders the waiting areas of ER words, oops, wards, inspecting empty coffee cups to see if they can divine in the leftovers what the patient's ailment might be…
mean time
The red eyes of rabbits
Denise Levertov: The Springtime
The rabbit's eyes aren't blue.
Or are they?
The red-eye flight gets you in
early in the morning.
That means that unless you're
some sort of piston
pumping ramrod-straight
along a longitude
you'll need to wind your watch forward
to make up for the time you've lost.
Who knows what might have happened
in those over-looked hours?
geographies: the Mackenzie River valley
Peat forests are especially
carbon-dense, but their
curated selection depends
upon those attributes which
abound in the current season.
Data is king. Social plat-
forms abound. Yet there is
no one size fits all solution
when it comes to new in-
formation technologies.
For Veterans’ Day,
Donald J. Trump had
a sweatshop in Myanmar
run him up a Buddha
the size of the ones that
used to be at Bamiyan.
Had a hand at the end
of an elevator arm in
which he was carried
up from the stage to a
height approximately
equal to 2000 bodies
stacked one on top of
another. From where
he delivered a speech
that was amplified /
televised / digitalized /
YouTubized so that the
whole world could
know what the sound of
one hand crapping was.
One thought on “Poetry from Mark Young”
Great work, Mark! I especially loved “the sound of one hand crapping”.
Great work, Mark! I especially loved “the sound of one hand crapping”.