I was there when the SWAT team breached, MP5 pressed into my face over insurance fraud allegations. I have marginal regrets mostly around how little money I made from the whole ordeal.
Author: David Greenspan
David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence (Driftwood Press). He’s a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA from UMass Amherst. His poems have appeared in places like Bellevue Literary Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Narrative, and West Branch.
NSWD 25
No this is not parabola. Hyperbole perhaps. All those lonely L sounds. Fourteen years since I’ve willingly done heroin. Synthetic opioids count on drug panels. We bill extra for buprenorphine.
NSWD 24
Want to talk money? I knowingly participated in the urine analysis gold rush of 2014. We billed insurance companies an average of $3,000 per lab run test, another $500 for specimen collection (one same gendered behavioral health technician, making $12/hour, standing in the room eyeing the patient’s genital of choice). Two tests per patient per week, census never dipping below ten beds. Average stay of one month. Discounts for cash pay. Scholarships available.
NSWD 23
The ball, thrown and tedious, slips through my hands.
NSWD 22
I’m wearing yellow again. It’s Labor Day and we’re not doing a thing with any sharpened nails. If you have to ask, etcetera. Another mechanical chirp, another brass tack. The sky unfurls itself around my you know what. Spit take and such.
NSWD 21
The cat sleeps curled against the small of my back. If she ever doesn’t I’ll jump from a third story window hoping to fail at death but only a little.
NSWD 20
My god, do you know who I am? The usual facts. My chest hurts. I name it respiratory depression. Desire like a gift horse’s hoof, no music. Shame admitted to during an interview with myself in a Metro-North bathroom in Port Chester, New York as I finish the blue stamped RIP heroin bag.
NSWD 19
Looking at my arms, several days of growth after shaving. The tug of the razor, tension coiled and released as I drag it first with then against the top of hands and knuckles. Two passes each.
NSWD 18
What else stains my glasses, the front of my shirt? Passive like black nail polish. I skip stones into the above ground swimming pool we name grief.
NSWD 17
My name won’t outlive me. It won’t even live me. Other David Greenspans: a playwright, another poet, an investment banker, a real estate podcaster, davidgreenspan.com, davidgreenspan.org, like bells, stray thoughts.