Michael Salcman

In This House
 
The days grew longer--
They’d lost their natural rhythm
And melody
And you knew you were growing older,
Sleeping more and getting less rest
While forgetting the lyrics
To song after song.
 
You tried hard to remember
But at the end of the day
They were gone,
Those little bits of you
Now belonged to a stranger
You’d met somewhere else
And no longer knew.



Books include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises), nominated for The Poets Prize, The Enemy of Good Is Better, Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing (Persea Books, 2015), A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces, the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). My fifth collection, Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published last year (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022).