Richard M. Berlin is a psychiatrist and poet who received his undergraduate and medical education at Northwestern University. He trained in psychiatry at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and was a fellow in consultation/liaison psychiatry at Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va. The winner of numerous poetry awards, his first collection of poems, How JFK Killed My Father, won the Pearl Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions. Berlin's poetry has also been published in a broad array of anthologies, literary journals, and medical journals including his column “Poetry of the Times,” which is featured each month in Psychiatric Times. An associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, he is the author of more than 60 scientific papers and has edited Sleep Disorders in Psychiatric Practice (Ryandic Publishing) and Poets on Prozac:Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). He practices psychiatry (including psychotherapy) in a small town in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts.
MANAGED CARE ALIENS
I love the way you look almost humancarrying your palm pilots and leather attaches,dressed in your elegant chalk-striped navy bluesuits and black Cole Haan shoes. I love the wayyour species can morph into new creatures,all of them life-like and friendly but without memoriesof all the agreements I signed in the past,how I never meet the same creature twice.I love the way you have turned me into an alien, too,listing my name in networks that existonly in your spaced-out mind. I love your immunityfrom earth's laws, the way you pretend to provide a universeof service when all you do is take up space,like bottles of body parts floating in formaldehydeon a laboratory shelf. Yet I confess I loveyour earthly manners, your pretense we are friendsworking together to care for the planet's sickand suffering, your friendly hand reaching outwith a number I can bounce off an orbiting satelliteand connect with you for free. I love the spaceymusic you play while I wait to hear your synthesizedvoice, your computer-enhanced phrases, and top-secretbilling codes. And like ET, I know you will always belonely on our planet, no matter how much I love you.So touch my middle finger, bathe me in starlight,and like a good extraterrestrial, please go home.
Copyright 2009, Psychiatric Times, CMPMedica.All rights reserved.
Sheri Butler Hunt, M.D., is a graduate analyst in the adult and child divisions at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. A published poet and member of TAP's editorial board, she welcomes readers' comments and suggestions at .