WORDS ARE STUPID

Watch me pronounce
Them dead, surprised
Like my brother slipping
From his chair to the floor

He waited long enough
To share a smile with
a visiting neighbour.
The way it used to be
a wellness check
happening naturally

To witness the clutch of his chest
The slip of his bottom from his chair
to the floor, his vacating eyes leaving
Through our family’s pain room door.

TIN PAIL
1.
I should get a pail. or
I should have a pail. Yes
that’s more like it.
If I had a pail
I could carry
 my head in it,
but only when
it is too heavy
for my cervical spine.
so most of the time.

2.
I forbid any talk
about Liza.

I forbid any talk
about holes.

I forbid any talk
of bottoms.

You see, the next
thing you’ll talk

you’ll talk about the
hole in Liza’s bottom.

You’ll forget
the pail completely

you dirty minded
rascal.

3.

All I’ve got
is my head
in a pail.

Lucky man
my angels carry
the pail between

them. Ever so well
leaving
my body in hell.

EERRRG!!!!!!
There goes the bell!

DO NOT DOUBT ME 2.0

There are questions that bare asking, my underpants are clean.
I do not like questions asked for no good reason. Why, tell me, do people ask questions of which they have firm grasp of the answer.
You may rest assured that if ask you a question, I do not know the answer. What would be the point, I nearly had myself there. (I’ve lost a word here, meaning beating around the bush. Starts ciircum) My mind is not as sharp as it once was. Imagine what it once was. Now imagine my brain diminished. I ask a question. Say, what do you use or do to float a ballon.
Well, you can blow air in it. But I believe helium is the word you are looking for.
See how polite an answer can be. And no doubt that I am asking a question to which I need to hear an answer likely because I have forgotten it. Yes, thank you, I reply. There is a dangerous point in the exchange where you might make fun of who-ever is asking the question, say namely me, the answer is considered to be known by most.
I’ve been alerted that pieces of my brain are being found from ocean to ocean to ocean, though so far limited to above the 49th parallel. I consider it likely that some words, and the answer to questions that I cannot reach as easily as I used to, lie in the brain’s scattered debris.

TURN

There is nothing
To see reported
The technician

I turned my head
My cervical spine recoiled
A ripple for a cripple
X-ray showing clear
Nothing but screaming echoes
Smashing my ticky tack
back. Cut to black

ALL MY PARANOIAS

1.

They chase me down like a Thurber cartoon
Some so simple as “you stink” as I sniff and sniff
And can’t tell the difference since yesterday. There’s the one
“you think you’re so smart,” all frown and sneer
“you and your big words, who do you think you are,”
lobbed like a frozen horse turd, as I turn my head +
start to run. “Hah, you’re so fat, look at you!!!
I have my own jeering section, “yeah, that!!”

My heart thumps me a good one, changing my direction
maybe maybe maybe baby this is the big one you’ve
all been waiting for, and me too even more than you
My bum ticker stops, I dream my father’s benediction.

MORNING DEVOTIONAL

My care aide laces
me into my DNA
every morning
doubling down
to use the last
possible threads
keeping me together
the laughing man.

LOSER

Sad does not begin to describe the moods
I carried over my shoulder or rolled uphill
I was not ready to understand

my imagination held the keys of hope,
doggedly dragging downhill skis across the ploughed fields.
There were no hills in a prairie town, not ours
Not anyones, my relatives taunting me jeering at my interests
Give me a book, balls I cannot throw far enough
To escape the gravity that pounds me to the ground
Once fallen, I feel my cousins kneeling on my back
Bitter boy hard learning spitting dirt left
To my heavy breathing I get up again and again
Tiresome it’s a wonder how often this game
Mantles my shoulders bends my spine
Now I am a crooked man damned
To body work ongoing, my brain
Threatens giving out well before
Another joint is replaced. I fall
And I fall and I fall three times
I rise, abhor all religions yet
I scream in its brick passageways
While echo releases her stays.

BELIEVE YOU ME

The first time my mother spoke to me after she died was as I stumbled up a few steps from the church to the hearse. “Straighten up!” she ordered,” an encouragement my father heard most every day after his retirement, until she died, first. This was not in their plan. Dad, older goes first, mother follows. “Man plans, God laughs,” said my psychiatrist.

“Lousy cartilage genetics,” said my foot and ankle surgeon. Unfortunately, despite the favourable percentages my ankle fusion failed, only his 3rd of 300 surgeries. After he finally believed me and ordered more revealing scans which exposed the defect was his rather than my psychological shortages which is often the first go-to when something goes wrong, is wrong, especially if there is a note in your file.

My parents didn’t believe me for three months after moving to the city, I was in a new school, and neither teacher or students believed me, worse,
neither did our jovial GP. Finally, I was sent to another appointment with our family doctor who did the one test needed to save me months of pain. He tried to bend my left heel to my left buttock. I screamed a scream heard all over the hospital. I was on a stretcher to the X-ray in no-time, confirming something that’s easily referred to as a slipped hip.

A faulty joint, cartilage involved. Maybe, but no one would believe me, until I had three 4-inch pins in my hip. Everyone was so very sorry, kids being who they are, said they were forced to visit to see I had been telling the truth, and give me a get-well card. My doctor’s name was Dr. Bruiser. That’s, right, and I loved him for stopping my pain. All better after three months of physical therapy. Except for my relationship with my parents, we were done.

Likewise, the surgeon’s one year delay in admitting his failed ankle fusion, was one of the reasons that my 3rd wife was through with me, both cases my parents and my wife were going on the best advice the advice of doctors. Who was I to be believed. I checked my options and ruled out a do-over and asked for an amputation. This was a surprise, hadn’t I heard about Phantom Limb Pain?

Yes, I said. I am determined NOT to have anything to do with that! But look at the odds. Yes 30% of limb amputations do not, I repeat, do not experience any phantom limb pain. I was in the 1 % of your surgeries that failed. I’ll go with 30%!
I won that bet!

All the pain I have left is the “real pain.” I suffer now with chronic pain due to osteoarthritis, and terrible disc degenerative disease, leaving a bend
in. my spine big enough to stick your fist in it I have pictures.

My mother told my dad to straighten up because he had horrible cartilage genetics, the least he could do is stand up straight! As a biology teacher she knew better, but speaking helped her remember her husband with a “ram-rod straight” back, whose posture now would best be described as a question mark.

My mother’s family genetics were all about cancer. She died first. Even though my mother never smoked a day in her life, and though she looked after a sister dying who also had not smoked, I was at her funeral too. I can’t remember, but I may have been a pall bearer. It was common for families to supply one male family member to a serve as pall bearers at funerals. Families were large and usually the problem was deciding which family to leave out, we were usually cooperative but sometimes it couldn’t be avoided, but the honour must be accepted for my grandmother’s funeral.

I accompanied my mother on a near weekly visit to grandma in the old-folks home to listen to her mother blinded by doctors who considered her eyesight unnecessary after she was 88. She showed me how to stook sheaves of grain just a year before.
She died with her cataracts on when she was 97. She would praise my mother for getting an education, an earning money of her own, for having made the right choice. “I can see that now. I’m sorry, I wish I had encouraged your sisters.”

I think of the “West,” leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban. I visited in 2008; my book Afghanistan Confessions is dedicated to my mother. She knew what it was like to get an education in a conservative fundamentalist (Mennonite in her case) farming community. The three of us, two still standing, agree we were, to some extent, “collateral damage,” but it had been an important thing to do. Many of my mother’s former students, mostly women, said my mother had been their role model.

“I’ve had a good life,” said my mother before she died. I called my dad. My sister was looking after him while I was sitting with my mother. Our dad insisted she drive them to the hospital. He said he wanted to say a proper goodbye, after he made their bed.

« N

HOW QUICKLY I FORGET

Last season’s elevator story was the kids asking about my fake leg. I explained my amputation and the two girls rolled away on their scooters. Shouting “You should be a pirate! Argh!”
Today being a pirate was not on my mind, having a mind was. After a melt-down in the Counselor’s meeting room earlier in the day I was delivered safe and sound to my building and moving towards the elevator. I said, “we can all fit.” They climbed aboard, and I was let out on my floor just one floor away and made the other passengers get out. They were trying to hold the elevator.always breathe by victor enns book cover

I all but forced them to let go when I realized, with the elevator leaving that they were indeed trying to hold the elevator to ride to the next floor. I had just started to roll away in my power wheelchair, when I remembered. “OH SHIT!” I exclaimed and wheeled around. “You were intending to go to the next floor! Oh man, I’ve just been diagnosed with dementia, and this is happening more and more often.”
The trip was from one floor to the next, and I had forgotten in those seconds what the other passengers had wanted and bullied them away. Maybe a bit harsh, and yes once I said “I ‘ve just recently been diagnosed with Dementia,“ the other three passengers softened up, and said; “Oh. Don’t worry. Please this is not our greatest misfortune.” I was not bald hmm bold enough to ask for their story and scuttled away with my catastrophic thinking, writing up the disaster. At least they didn’t live on my floor.

DON’T LISTEN

God, you often lifted me high
out of stupid red wagons

afraid when I was a child Up a tree
the angels sang

in comfort and thought, you
only gave me a language to learn

You laugh at me hiding in my iron tree
I spit in your eyes! You are

Ubu ubu ubu . My wife
tells the dog; Quit it, Quit it

Quit it, and he doesn’t listen.
Leaving.

Leaving,
only a wag. (Dream Song 14, John Berryman , just this wonderful last line.)
Don’t know where the poem wants to stop. It’s cut in the German version maYbe the German dog didn’t have a tail.

HÖRT NICHT ZU

Gott du hast mir als Kind aus Wagen hoch oft gehoben.
Die Engeln singen alle Mit Trost und Gedanken,
du gibst mir nur eine Sprache zu lernen
lachest du mir auf mein Eisen Baum
so spuck ich in deine Augen! Du bist
Ubu ubu ubu und mein Wieb sagt’s dem Hund
Quit it, Quit it, und er hört nicht zu.

DON’T LISTEN

God, you often lifted me out of stupid red wagons
when I was a child. The angels sang in comfort and thought
you only gave me a language to learn.

You laugh at me in my iron tree
I spit in your eyes! You are
Ubu ubu ubu . My wife

tells the dog; Quit it,
Quit it, and he doesn’t
listen.

SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL
June 2, 2025

I shoulder the pain
my shoulder is the pain
every time I move left
raise my arm it sounds
like a broken marimba
you built one from scratch
not on computer not even
from a DIY kit but
by the seat of your
pants home to a very
attractive bottom
that I don’t see
often enough
my pain my own
goddamn pain
smacks me down
to a full stop
all I do
is whimper

GRAVITY

Sadly I should rename these faux poems
then dig a hole in the snow.
Print them hard. Dig a hole.
There they go! With a big smile
my words all on fire.

Sadly sadly I change my clothes
wonder where the courage goes
disc degeneration piles my disks
each an indication of my risks.

Gravity squashes my belly fat,
diaphragm grasps, bellows, sobs,
one more time and time again
I’m done in by stupid mobs.

THE SCALE OF MY MISFORTUNE
Like everything about me
the scale of my misfortune
frightens those about me
as my mother said though tell me
Tell me something anything
before I’m dead. Don’t make
me plague your dreams, like last
night wanting you to drive us home
dad asking where you hid his flat cap
bullying you down Main Street
Garry already in the driver’s seat
waiting to turn into the Exchange.
Consider angels on your shoulders
Arguing the afterlife is better
cleaner after all, no more
toilet tissue tearing
No more picking up
after your pooch let’s
print the form MAiD to order
give you some time to think it over
music we’ll choose together
but none live no deep dive
I gave away my gear sum time
ago we’ve never made it under
Water will float your boat, we’ll
pack it with your remaindered
lines drones will drag you out to sea
my tender button brought aflame
saying my best goodbye,
my cheeks blushing,
again and again waves
waves to see you go

I have been diagnosed with dementia, either Lewy body or vascular, following a six hour test where I did as bad and as well on various kinds of thinking,writing, reading and comprehension tests as my previous “lived experience” foretold. Complications a bound. It’s good to find symptoms and diagnosis early, but it can be also be a sign for self-fulfilling prophecy. Paradox lives here. I have done a slight reorganization of my website. Vicipedia has been moved to the letter V in Archives which are growing larger, and I don’t care. I am also printing many more of my files to donate to the Mennonite Archives in Winnipeg.

BROKEN

My brain my brain
why have you forsaken
me. How many poems
Will I still write
crying my eyes
out. I can still
see. But what is
seeing when I
Don’t know
words Don’t know
words I can’t
say
nothing

DISCLAIMER: BELIEVE YOU ME!
I am not you.
I practice breathing every-day. It Is a vital pain management technique I practice up to an hour with Body Scan Mindfulness technique every day. For over two decades now. Mindful breathing is available to me whenever I need it, with the ability to calm panic attacks, an alternate choice to Quetiapine trade name, Seroquel. Meds and breathing work for me. Remember I’m telling stories about me, and I am not you!!!

My breathing nearly stopped July 19th, 2022. My dosage for a major pain prescription change was badly bungled. I nearly died. My wife realized something had gone wrong after my first dose of mandated Methadone.

Only General Practionners that can “follow-up” are allowed to issue scripts, triplicate scrips I think they are called. I had a GP. One that understood that many and likely most people wanting opioid prescriptions would take it only as prescribed for pain. Because they were effective to treat their pain. Opioids work for me, but my GP left, and I was left with no Kelowna No GP Blues again!

Opioids are dangerous, they can be addictive. They can kill you. So remember I AM NOT YOU. You may need a completely different pain management strategy. My pain is real. My pain treatment plan works, it works for me. REMEMER I AM NOT YOU!!!

Opioids are a major element in managing my excruciating pain due to genetic loss of cartilage often creating agonizing bone on bone pain. My generating stations. Believe me, it hurts. Credibility is a huge problem for people seeking to control their pain. My GP left the Okanagan, my GP that understood my pain, returned to Alberta.

My new psychiatrist (I did persist and was able to get a BC psychiatrist because of my age, as it turns out) calls it “fair control;” I can’t write if I am in really awful pain, so I seek to reduce my pain so I can write and continue contributing to my community. That is to maintain fair control of my mind to keep using it to work and to love. Here I am. Or there I am, breathing!

I can NOT write if medication negates thinking and writing. I did the romantic alcoholic high functioning pretension years after I was first diagnosed with depression. Please read Jimmy Bang Poems for details. Depression is a big part of my story, Always Breathe. We have copies available here, online and at Mosaic Books. Thank You to a great indie bookstore! Buy here and I can inscribe your book, minimally with my signature, date and location, I can also write; To my friend Henry “Hurry” Harder, or some such name you provide me. I warn you however that my inscriptions tend to be really messy. Yes, I write cursive longhand.
Now, back to the story, though from here on in my wife knows more particularly what happened to me than I, because I was unconscious.

I digress. I divert. Anything not to repeat that my wife found me next to her hardly breathing, non-responsive. Unable to wake me she immediately called 911 and a few minutes later the paramedics arrived.
I had been asked, no, I was ordered to start taking methadone so I would stop taking opioids. I had no GP, The only help for my pain I could find must come from a doctor called an addictionist. But, but, but! But nothing! Take this.
We had to track down the prescription because it had been phoned into the wrong pharmacy, one across the street where nobody knew me. It was handed to me in a brown bag, by a young adult male, that thrust it into my hand and said, here. Instructions inside. OK, don’t know me or me him from Adam and I see there’s a bottle of methadone inside. I had been titrating and had had taken my last single low dose opioid in the morning, and it was to be ok to take the methadone at 8 pm or later…I have suffered through many medication changes. It was only this one that tried to kill me.

To begin again. My breathing nearly ended on July 19, 2022. My dosage for a major prescription change was bungled. My wife realized something was wrong. She couldn’t wake me. She phoned 911 and I was rescued by paramedics who raced to the Kelowna ER, where I was intubated so I would get some air. My wife was told it was unlikely that I would live; did she have our DNR. No, she said. No.

The team was frustrated, but went back to work, shaking their heads. They saved my life. As it was, I spent six days in ICU in a medically induced coma, and another week in a hospital ward. I was able to leave only when I could breathe sufficiently maintaining 92% blood oxygen levels. I needed chewing and swallowing lessons since they had sucked a mélange of supper and snacks; my wife and I were sternly advised to chew, again with the head shake making it clear they would take no responsibility for what the newly revived Victor would be able, or not able to do.

There. Take a deep breath. (Inhale deeply) That’s better. A character in a Christopher Durang play is asked; “What’s the secret of life?”
“Always breathe,” the wise answer. Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn the meditation guide says that if you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you.
I give you the secret of life. Always Breathe. For more on the story we have books for sale here, at Mosaic Books, and online at my website
[email protected].

HERE I AM AGAIN
With not the time for a proper edit, so as much as I ash pout BELIEVE YOU ME!! I caution you not. Writers no matter from when or where make shift up. Preferable to getting feces on my hand on the last triumphal swipe of my bum. We will make modifications using wet wipes when needed; but NOT I repeat into the toilet. It’s by “lived experienced” that I can verify my plumber’s advice. “Don’t believe what they say, including on the package, I’ve had to fix more toilets that have been clogged with alcohol wipes than most anything g else. Plumber Approved!” My Ass!”

So a special basket for wet wipes when absolutely necessary, but I’m not ready yet to have a care aide wipe my bum. Remember please, I am not you and I make things up.

BROKEN
My brain my brain
why have you forsaken
me. How many poems
Will I still write
crying my eyes
out. I can still
see. But what is
seeing when I
Don’t know
words Don’t know
words I can’t
say
nothing

UNDATED JOURNAL ENTRY

It has taken 6 hours to beat my pain back far enough to sit down and try to write a few lines. Having reached this position, I told Jayden I liked hanging out with her, echoing her words from last week.

No sooner are they spoken when Michelle arrives. . Her needs are greater than mine, I’ll agree. She has completed a PH.D. in Disability Studies. I will elaborate when I see the title again. I have read some pages, her work could be used for policy making and I am glad the subject of putting younger people in Care Homes because we as a society can’t or won’t provide a better option is the subject of study, this be a fear a big fear of mine, though I’ll never be young again.

I scream adjectives, metaphors, curses trying all the while not to move. Michelle stops work to rest all afternoon. Sometimes my work outpaces her. I am writing about Life and Death Drives, using my life as autofiction writing poetry and fiction. I count ted 18 projects I have to work on. My psych urges me to keep writing, reading too, helps my deteriorating brain. Dementia remember. But I’ll avoid the digression that tempted me in stead.

My wife has MS (Multiple sclerosis) and diabetes. She users some of the same medicines that I use, She has been prescribed Ozempic with the delightful side effect of weight loss, a full 70 lbs. I spoke to my psychiatrist Dr. Anna Wieniawski (SP?), who noted my distress and not wanting to leave the house or actually my room.

WHAT CAN I DO

But love you
What can I do
But seek the end
Of sensibilities
Ask for your hand
Your lips need kisses
I can bring
Picnic baskets
Full of foods mew can’t
Eat. Our bodies
Shaking fingers
hands trembling
Wirth unrequited
Desire I wish
You a happy birthday
this year and every day
My consciousness
Allows me to think
To clarify like butter
What thoughts I am
tying to turn loose
Raise our heads
Let’s raise our heads
Raise our heads
High!

Your ever loving g husband Ides of March
Your birthday
March 15 2025

THREE WAY CONVERSATION

Or could we call it four since you Dr were talking
to another in a foreign language spy spy my
little eye I roll manually down to my
almost resident near doctor’s bedside
“Touch me. Feel me, see my
“ new bump. Wait a minute
that was today not yesterday,”

which is a whole other ball
of wax, the kind you settle
your toilet on which seals
firmly. When I sit on all 19”
of it comfort height
for a tall boy a fat boy
hamburgers ruled out
Dr is hot and unhappy
I increased my dose
without asking
by another 2 mgs
of opioid in a stupid
suck it up with Naloxone

We’re three my dear wife
Would prefer to be sleeping
Dr’s other patient has wandered away
They would prefer to be sleeping
My mother would prescribe a weight
loss pill like Ozempic in a sprinter’s minute
taught biology you know but she be dead.
Never any of her progeny be Doctor Doctors
but grandkids Ph.D. doctorates to fill walls
mine kids hang as pictures above my bookshelves

So we increased my Gabapentin and kept
my forced additional 2mgs of Suboxone
But that was yesterday hurtday everyday
I am trying to write it out by writing
Writing it down joint after joint my body
Try them all, THC CBT no damn good
bone on bone I tell you no cartilage
You still on the phone let me tell you

That was yesterday no more “dahlink”
my surgery can’t come too soon.

THE REAL STORY
MY pain came screaming
At 5 a.m. sooner but I could
Sleep until 5:00 a.m. Sucked
three Suboxone, took my other pills
But none you say for weight loss.

Go pain go! I’m not ready
for M.A.I.D. and the cemetery
Bone on bone made for each
but no cartilage to make bones
swing remember my dangerous
Dancing my jolly bones no ok
I can hardly turn my wheels
I can hardly stand up no more
Calls calls today are verboten
A heating pad on one lump
Or two, Body Scan meditation
It all helps until it doesn’t
Bet you can tell I’m thinkin
Thinking hard about the dark
Fire to set me free I have poems
I have an hour until I can medicate.

ENNS STOMP
Published: MAY 2, 2025 | Edit
Inspiration wracks
cough in cough
let me out!

Spit in the tissue
Show is over, top sheet
under my desk, over
foot, where we draw

the line with a biro pen
measures the progress
of another mandolin
shaped swelling hides

under my linen
sheet settles down
dementia yanks
my chin wags

what a drag
boredom opens
the gate I sing
crazier songs

falling under
the apple tree
Stumble bum
I was then still

am angry angrier
stomping on jam

GUS TAKES A RUN AT THE DARK

It’s four in the morning and Gus my tabby cat
leaps onto the open window screen chasing
Birds in the dark the screen falls out so does
Gus waking me from a coarse slumber one
leg on and one leg off I tumble into my wheel
chair rolling far enough to reach the fallen
Screen and the cat came back jumps to rest
on my shoulder purring all I can do is stroke
Petting the cat over and over on my shoulder
purring his panic and mine as well I reach
the flimsy screen (fallen on the roof) pull it into
my room a room of a recluse wanting nothing
so much as the excise of pain storming
my spine once again while Gus rests
his chin on the side of his DIY box lined
with a blanket of stars look he seems to say
I nearly had that pecker head before you
turned the light on and scared him away
By the way do you notice the light is still
on and hoorah you saved the screen, me
I would have been fine he says with a sniff
I’ve lived rough hunted my breakfast many
a morning but this morning I could tell
you needed me on your shoulder, now
back to sleep you poor assemblage
of fear and good fortune good night
let’s be pals in the moonlight sleeping
into another dream hunt of feathers and flight
Goodnight good night Gus says to me
I gave you quite a fright as I tumbled
didn’t I just my four legs spread wild
tumbling outside on the roof side
I mooned the bird and declared
this space and this time as hours

SHIFT CHANGE
— He was running away he said, when we pulled him over. I asked him from what, thinking maybe there had been a bar fight after closing, though he didn’t look beat up.
He had been going over 120 in an 80-kilometer zone.
— I wet the bed he replied.
— What?
— I was staying with some friends overnight so I could drive in the morning. I woke up wetting the bed. I was horrified! I fixed everything the best I could, and left a note trying to explain and offering to pay any cleaning costs. I couldn’t face them in the morning. I took my bags…I have never wanted to be in my own bed so much in my life. I just want to go home.
— Where’s home?
— Arnes, just past Gimli. God, can you imagine buying adult diapers in a small town drug store?
— Can I have your license please?
— No worries. It will be clean.
— So I went back to the car and we ran his license and his plates. He was right. He was also an amputee, but seemed fine with his fake leg. There was no need for him to get out of his mini-van. I checked with Todd and he agreed we could let him off with a warning. He’s left, already?
— You had to feel for the guy. I came back to his window and returned his license. Can you imagine what it must be like; he’s not even that old. He was crying and going on about how many more humiliations he would suffer before he would die. Dying is over rated he told me, and death the opposite.
— That worried me a bit so I asked about whether he was in a hurry to meet his maker.
— No, he said. I may welcome death, but I don’t want to kill myself. I haven’t tried to commit suicide since high school. What a mess that was!
— Ok, well take her easy; drive safe.
— That was that. And away he went. A quiet night otherwise. He reached for his coat. I’ll be happy to get home. — Good night, Bob.

Edit
CONNECT
Email me.
SEARCH

BLOG SUBSCRIPTION
To receive notification of new articles.
You may manage your subscription options from your profile.

LOGOUT

Selected Readings by Victor Enns. Order Always Breathe online.