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Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

My job on these monthly columns/essays has always been to “spell out” poets and their poems. This month and next (September) it will be my pleasure to bring to you Quad City based poets I have known and appreciated for decades. First, and not in any preferential posting is The poet Mike Bayles  latest book adventure titled “Breakfast at the Good Hope Home.” It appears as honest fiction to me, within the challenges he captures from the disease Alzheimers. Prose and  poems are attached in this story about an observed Fred. Bayles  language  moves  in and out of prose and poetry. His poems  as I recognize  them,  are integrated and relate to his story telling. What follows as a poem appears untitled. His  story line allows us in and out of what we think is prose and into a poem then out. Very inventive and a credit to Bayles’ vision and skills.  The book/ the story is fiction as declared by the author.

First steps and walking,

a  toddler dreams

sitting in a big boy chair

before taking strides

and learning to fly

while his father watches

with pride

school and college coursework

and a lifetime of work

as young adults learn

until the latest stages

when an adult unlearns

work of a lifetime

school and college coursework

with a quiet despair

as his son watches

father falls

losing strides

now belted in an old man’s chair

remnant memories

of first steps and walking.

Accumulations of plaque

twist and kill cognition,

whether from aluminum cookware

we can only speculate causes

of plaque that kills the brain

in a man, who in early stages

otherwise appears healthy. 

When there’s something we can’t cure

it hurts to say, it’s in someone else’s hands.

When I was much younger, the condition(s) diagnosed  as Alzheimer’s seemed to directly relate to the phrase hardening-of-the-arteries. Some of you readers can relate to the earlier  expression that led to/caused death of our elderly loved ones.  Mike has put his book “Breakfast at the Good Hope Home” in the best light for those of us who have cared and suffered in the  diagnoses Alzheimers. In many ways, Mike Bayles has crafted an instruction.

In September, the latest from another Quad-Cities based poet. Join me here then.