and they sparkle

with bright edges

some poems

start with the peak

one great line

brief shiny brilliance

and then they sort of splat out

in a spludge of explication

creating a thick base

the balance of heavy foundation

like a pyramid

some poems

have a peak

and a wide middle

with sharp sides

and a quick

downward slope

to the

bottom

tip

like a diamond

some poems

seem to start

in the middle

of a messy wadge of complexity

preponderances and such stuff

which then whittle away

at its bulk

in a sleek

downward cut

towards a sharp

point

like an inverted pyramid

some poems

have that finish

that patina

that crisp snip

that ka-tish Bomp

pa-ting tang

haiku-y

sort of thing

going on

some poems

speak

in tiny

thoughts

echoing

echoing

glowing

shining in the quiet

in

the

dark

at

the end

ah discovery. oh joy and rapture. it is like pulling out the clients' teeth without enough anesthetic. and then the struggle to make sense of the scraps of information you’ve managed to glean and put it into a coherent format with full and complete sentences in full legalese and replete with such great and interesting personal information about details of lives that you’d probably rather not know.

and one of the questions, about five down or so, is asking if the plaintiff, the person answering the questions is dead. so far, the responses have been approximately as follows:

10 - no

10 - n/a

6 - living

5 - not dead

4 - don’t understand the question

2 - huh?

1 - nope

and

1 - not yet

truth is, many of these people will most likely be dying much sooner than they had anticipated, after having believed they were doing the good and healthy thing.

and some of the interrogatories are asking about personal genetic history, who their direct ancestors were and what they died of and how old they were – cheesy life expectancy sort of genetic bias questions. you can hear the defendants gearing up their defense in order to minimize their actions in the background. and some people truly don’t have a clue. no idea who their grandparents are or when they died. some know down to the date and time and describe it with some detail, some sort of gruesomely, some very gently.

one says died of liver failure after drinking self to death and one says died of lung cancer after smoking a pack a day for 20 years, and one says died 1989 heart attack. and some say passed away in his sleep, and some say not dead yet but any day now and some say cancer some time in the 70's and one says she took a bad fall and one says he went in a car accident. one woman took me all the way back to the 1700s to her family’s arrival from europe. last friday i drafted one for a client who is a nurse, and she answered hers with lots of nurse lingo. so her family all died of long scientific latin complications with acronyms and abbreviations. instead of a heart attack some one dies of acute MI - Hx of CAD.

the lives of these people, the medical histories of their relatives, their personal details, their tax information, their financial histories, their ex-wives and husbands, the child support that they pay and receive, their gyno exams and urine sample results, all stripped down by the defendants to be examined naked. supposedly done to see if they’re hiding anything, that they aren’t fraudulently jumping on the litigation bandwagon to hit the jackput – but it’s really all just part of the humiliation and intimidation process because when you get right down to it, none of this stuff is really that important in the great scheme of things, nor does it really have that much to do with their case, and frankly, it’s just plain none of the defendants’ business.

and it’s the ultimate insult added to injury for my poor plaintiffs – they’ve been poisoned and seriously injured by a giant multi-billion dollar drug corporation, and they’re essentially strip searched and forced to dance naked before they can prove themselves worthy to collect their pittance fee before they die.

but it’s required. part of the rules of litigation. got to do the discovery. both sides have to do it. and you have to try to disclose whatever you’ve got or at least identify and acknowledge and label it, make note of it. this is to be done in good faith. showing our hands palms up. yes we are who we say we are, we are really injured, we’d like you to come clean and take some responsibility for your brutal profit-driven behavior and be the miracle healers you put yourself out to be in your advertisements, and we ask that you take care of the harm you have created, admit your mistakes, and let us all get some closure and move on with what’s left of our injured lives.

and our individual people have to show all and stand before the giant corporation completely naked and vulnerable in order to be taken seriously. but if they are willing to put themselves through this sort of hassle, they will eventually prevail against the goliath corporation because they have us on their side and we’re sweating blood in triplicate for them and they have to trust us to do the work and stand up for them and they have to come clean to us and give us their personal information.

but just try telling that to a frightened client who is terrified of the thought of going to court, angry that they’ve been injured and in fear of the possibility of emergency surgeries in the future that they may or may not survive, and they don’t want to turn over squat and don’t feel that they should have to.

and what they do eventually manage to disclose varies in all ways. some is hand-scratched on the backs of scrap paper. some is typed on clean white sheets. some is e-mailed into me in three different electronic formats. and some is written carefully and succinctly and some is rough angry scribbles of "i don’t know" and "i don’t remember." some you can tell took them hours and hours to just make themselves fill it out and be done with it because the ink changes more than three times, the handwriting is completely inconsistent, there are multiple coffee mug rings or butter stains or they wreak of hours of cigarette smoke or bacon grease.

and all of them, every single one of them, will require additional phone calls to clear up answers, fine them down, obtain some additional information, clarify our interpretations of their responses. and it’s under oath, and it can and will be used against them, and so it’s got to be right and honest and straight up.

but it makes me, who’s working so hard for them, look like the bad guy, extracting stuff out of them that they’re not willing to share. they think i must be super-nosey. that somehow we’re not doing our job of protecting them if they have to give all this information out, and what about all the identity theft the 10:00 news has them so terrified of?

the other day i did one for an 84 year old, and i felt amazed to peer into her life and listen to her list out her employment history to me in a very neat school teacher’s cursive script on nice water-marked stationary with an A for penmanship. she was a child during the depression and she describes the places she taught elementary school in Iowa and Missouri and Colorado and she knows who her grandparents are and when they died. and at the part where she has to list her physicians since birth she gives me the full names and addresses of every doctor she’s ever seen, all the way back to the doctor who delivered her at their farm in 1920.

most people can barely manage to give me the name of their current doctors – and they don’t know their full names, but they can give you driving directions to where they go to their appointments.

and i have a couple clients in this group who will simply not cooperate. not send answers in. schedule a time to talk to me about the questions. then too busy, re-schedule. too busy, things going on, not feeling good, must go away for the weekend on business, sent it already sent it and how strange you haven’t got it but it’s coming it will go out tomorrow or very soon anyway.

most of these clients had health insurance. which is rare when you get into basic personal injury litigation. a very large percentage of the time, people don’t have any health insurance and their medical history is sketchy, and they often even have a history of personal bankruptcy due to medical bills. but this is a product liability case against a huge drug manufacturer, and so they had to be lucky enough to be receiving the expensive state of the art designer miracle drugs, a privilege only those wealthy enough or employed long enough at a large enough corporation to be lucky enough to have health insurance and be prescribed the fancy chemical junk that has poisoned them. a few of them didn’t, however, but they still went out and got these drugs prescribed to them by doctors who didn’t know them because they’d seen all the ads and were convinced that they needed to have the latest miracle cures that would make them happy and beautiful like the people in the commercials.

and so this is my life at present. digging into, rifling through, drafting out, re-writing the portraits of a large group of human beings. creating detailed summaries of medical, financial and personal information of sick and injured and frightened people from their answers to forty invasive and ruthless trick questions designed to pry into their most vulnerable privacy, intimidate them, and trap them into disclosing something they can use against them.

and as i work on their responses, i feel i know them. feel very fond of them, very protective of them. want to keep them safe and help them. and somehow they have to trust me to do this for them, but it’s not easy because i look like i must be working for the bad guys to get all this information from them, and afterall, i do work for attorneys, and THEY are not to be trusted, no sir.

and this phase of the litigation is called "discovery."

so thinking about godzilla today. rising from the fetid aftermath of atomic bombs, morphed and mutated angry monster of the japanese postwar psyche disaster creature myth. although eventually, in subsequent films, he becomes their friend, their savior. he fights rodan and the smog monster and some other large and messy rubbery destructive guys bent on leveling tokyo. he sort of becomes their mascot. a great angry destructive force of nature gone radioactive who also has this playful friendly protective side, and so he’s tamed and loved and revered. a destructive demon shadow turned guardian spirit.

sort of like my father, in a way. a big man. larger than life, with dark eyes bushy monobrow across the forehead and black hair streaked with white and a deep boom voice. always drinking, always smoking, often laughing, sometimes yelling, sometimes mean, always demanding, regularly entertaining, utterly and completely dominating from a position of command control in a spinning barca lounger with television remote, drink, book, ashtray, phone and snacks. he was some kind of mutant throwback of another time, an independent newspaperman in a world gone tastelessly homogenous oligopoly corporate. he looked a little like jackie gleason with a heavy orson wells sort of aura with a sprinkling of albert finney and a generous dash of fred flintstone.

and he did love fireworks. and he loved to blow things up. one summer he blew up our swingset, a wading pool, our playhouse and the dogs’ water dishes. he almost burnt down a picnic table. and that year, his semi-adopted protege, his partner’s son, ended up in the hospital with pieces of a tin can explosion stuck in his knee caps. dad was not popular that year, but it did not slow him down.

and this year the fourth of July is a three day holiday weekend. this is how we celebrate our freedom here. we rejoice and blow stuff up. god bless america. praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

and it’s been 21 years since my father died. and there are lots of fireworks outside. and still they make me jump and nervous and a little irritable and start to lean back into my grouchy hyper vigilant somebody’s got to keep an eye on everything is something burning is everyone accounted for look out he’s got something big sort of panic mode.

the cats have been running in and out of the house all day. they want to play out on a nice day, but then things go boom and snap and sizzle and they high-tail it into the house in a dash. they keep trying to do their regular day jobs without success. izzy has to patrol the grounds in a counter clock-wise direction. jack has to talk to the squirrels and climb trees. bono has to try to sneak dry food out of the dish from the neighbors’ porch across the way without getting caught by the "other" cat not of his clan. dante has to toast himself in the sun. pepe has to lurk in the bushes and spy on everything that goes on in the neighborhood. but all the fireworks are interrupting their normal Saturday rhythm and they are not pleased. and they have to be on their toes. so i've brought them in early to cower in the bunker with me.

and right now some of the neighbors from next door are doing a dead end middle of the road sparkling fountain display as i type. and jack is upstairs with me watching this from perched high up in the window on top of the air conditioner. and i know how he feels.

though not as nervous about the fireworks this year as i normally am because even though we’re in a terrible drought, there’s actually been a fair amount of rain recently, and things are moistened down a bit.

live next to a strip of park that follows the creek (drainage ditch) and rings the house at the corner sort of like a moat. so the park is really like a big green alley, running behind the backs of several little houses in our neighborhood and we’re at the end of the deadend on the corner of the creek and the park.

lots of people in the park today. and it’s hot. in the 90s and there are fireworks and the smell of charcoal grills and kids shrieking and running with squirt guns and laughing and the clink of bottles and the slime of squished potato salad smeared on paper plates floating down the creek with bottle rockets and beer cans and frisbees and fresh cut grass.

having the whole fam-damn-ily over tomorrow for an outdoor event in the backyard. trying to plan the menu, but honestly not knowing what it’s going to be until i get out to the store tomorrow morning and see what’s on sale, what looks good. mother bringing dessert. niece wants to bring an appetizer. c will bring lots of red wine (nice dry cabernet from chile). sis will bring her trivial pursuit game. we’ll be able to see the main fireworks at the fairgrounds in the distance.

sometimes we don’t just watch them from a distance and we go down to a place next to the quarry out underneath right where they set them off against the fire-line out in the weeds with the yellow do not cross tape running right across our chests and watch the whole display going off in our laps. very intense. and dad would have loved that.

he was explosive. uncorked. out of control. able to break furniture, smash coffee tables, set off fireworks and shoot guns, and swear and spit and shout and break glasses and bend silverware, pound tables, demand service, stomp and yell and dole out commandments and he could sing old songs and tell jokes and ride motorcycles and play a mean standup bass and stuff olives up his nose.

sort of like having godzilla for a mascot.

and so it’s fourth of July and even though he died at christmas, it’s the fourth when we feel him the most. it’s the fourth when we re-live the drama and the trauma and the fire and the fun and the terror that was the big loud brief violent beautiful terrible irish explosion that was my father.

just another destructive demon shadow turned guardian spirit.