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A Song Too Soon
Michael Salcman

Sixty years of stalking
the proper word
I am my own invention.

Because Time is holy
the body is holy
especially the brain.

No ink on the skin
no drugs in the personality
no mulch in the ground.

Don’t need no stinking A.I.
don’t need going to the moon
don’t know how it comes too soon.

Don’t know.

—
Michael Salcman, poet, physician, and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine (his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, and healing), A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces (the inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems, also from Spuyten Duyvil, appeared in early 2022. Salcman’s forthcoming collection is Crossing the Tape (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024).

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