Poetry from Mark Young

 
 
 
 
 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. 

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