If pharmacy has replaced God, we cannot help but feel that it is a perverse chemistry—Octavio Paz
They’ve locked up all the painkillers and ice cream.
I want to tell you this. I don’t care
what they say in the theater, dying shouldn’t be this easy.
Or this hard — it’s hard to decide. Cases of analgesics
and greetings deteriorate while the Bicycle cards hang
from the shelves, unshuffled. In heaven
there is no shuffling, prays the corrupt suicide
king of hearts, not confessing to his crimes
but speaking out loud anyway to no one, just like this,
soliloquy passing like a blade through the head.
Can this even be out loud? Hard to decide.
The inventory is eclectic and extensive.
Chocolate chip cookie dough, aisle 2, press here
for help. Painkillers, aisle 3, press everywhere for help.
O come and get me killers and soothers of pain
and bring me my cookies to mine my data!
To visit nature we need studs in our tires
and beds, but that is another kind of farming,
a pharmacopoeia. The drugs are in back, front,
and already down our screened-in throats.
In the aisles the old women come and go, talking
of original oreos. The opposite of longing
is or is not shorting, that long shot.
Click here to read Harry Bauld on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
Harry Bauld:
Almost all poems—not just the explicitly ars poetica ones — seem somehow about the moment and wrinkle of their own making, as well as the triggering subjects with their associations and feelings. Pharmacy began with the oyster-itch of frustration and stupefaction in the aisles of my badly run local CVS (there were employee SCREAMING matches and pharmacist storm-outs during the early days of the first COVID vaccines) and took the better part of a year to grind into some kind of pearl. Many of its turns and allusions arrived unsolicited and unexpected—for example at some point it seemed apt that the fluorescent vulgarities of a chain drugstore had provoked a Prufrockian despair. I also often think of a poem as a dramatic monologue or soliloquy — Zulfikar Ghose suggested that all of modern literature seems like an attempt to write new soliloquies for Hamlet, and so then suddenly I was thinking of Ethan Hawke’s “To be or not to be” speech in a blockbuster video store in the Michael Almereyda film. I think any writer knows the feeling of being alone on the stage of the blank page, yaketing obsessions into the void. Along around draft nine, or maybe eleven, I began to the hear the irony of “farm” in the word pharmacy and to turn my rage at the chain pharmacy as a symbol of the degraded chaos of contemporary culture into the kind of word-drunk associative play and be-bop music that makes a poem and not an op-ed screed.
Harry Bauld was twice All-Ivy shortstop at Columbia and broke Lou Gehrig’s records. Unfortunately they were his academic records. He was included by Matthew Dickman in Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and his poems have appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and the U.K. Books: The Uncorrected Eye (2018); How to Paint a Dead Man (2020). He has performed in New York and elsewhere as a magician and jazz pianist, and his paintings have been exhibited in group shows in Vermont and New York.
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