Two More
Where There's Smoke
The candles throw up languid plumes,
silk scarves that drift across the room
and float between us, like ghosts.
I think that what we need the most is a new air,
free of fire, something to reform
these old flesh suits we have worn
since our time began here.
If you would be a new you,
and I, a new me,
reborn for all the world to see
then you'd stop drinking too much beer
or I'd stop longing for you to.
As it is, I'm driven to distraction.
You make me spell words wrong.
"Unlit" becomes "until"
and we can't have that. Imprecision
is the devil's work: it's him through you
that shakes my vision,
delivers whispered suggestions
'midst a heat haze to make
my hands tremble, the words come wrong.
I wish you didn't faze me. A cold life
is what I long for,
underneath the smoke: a life unlit
and until then
fire takes what it lets us see to mend.
We are burning
at both ends.
The Surgeon on Coffee Break
After Sylvia Plath
The room's three foot by five
where we have breaks.
My white coat fills it,
secures the table for me alone.
I have two minutes.
The fresh crop of manglings, once sown,
cannot be subdued. The body
has another blight, and so
I shall not rest. Tonight
the ether is sweet and foriegn
as a song in minor key.
It drifts across corridors
stacked with should-be-deads,
open mouths gaping for it
like old fish, pulmonary breaths
proclaiming, I am still here. I am me.
To do else is indignity,
or so they think. I would rather
that the blue light came for them,
silent and smooth. Angels move
and do not stir the air--
a lesson patients should take to heart.
My profession has been pulled apart
and sewed up clean. No more
hauling bodies to the Thames
once they're close enough
to the brink. We do things official now.
I have two green tablets with my drink,
just plop them in the dregs.
They glitter like snake's eyes
in brackish water. Now
I can work all night, damp with juices
from the jungle-fruits of organs,
death sliding ice cubes down my neck.
Hurry, hurry. I will not falter.
I cannot spare worry for the things
I cure, nor keep the contours
of their lumpy faces in my mind
beyond a moment. In the darkness
of the body garden, Chinese white
will do just fine.
The candles throw up languid plumes,
silk scarves that drift across the room
and float between us, like ghosts.
I think that what we need the most is a new air,
free of fire, something to reform
these old flesh suits we have worn
since our time began here.
If you would be a new you,
and I, a new me,
reborn for all the world to see
then you'd stop drinking too much beer
or I'd stop longing for you to.
As it is, I'm driven to distraction.
You make me spell words wrong.
"Unlit" becomes "until"
and we can't have that. Imprecision
is the devil's work: it's him through you
that shakes my vision,
delivers whispered suggestions
'midst a heat haze to make
my hands tremble, the words come wrong.
I wish you didn't faze me. A cold life
is what I long for,
underneath the smoke: a life unlit
and until then
fire takes what it lets us see to mend.
We are burning
at both ends.
The Surgeon on Coffee Break
After Sylvia Plath
The room's three foot by five
where we have breaks.
My white coat fills it,
secures the table for me alone.
I have two minutes.
The fresh crop of manglings, once sown,
cannot be subdued. The body
has another blight, and so
I shall not rest. Tonight
the ether is sweet and foriegn
as a song in minor key.
It drifts across corridors
stacked with should-be-deads,
open mouths gaping for it
like old fish, pulmonary breaths
proclaiming, I am still here. I am me.
To do else is indignity,
or so they think. I would rather
that the blue light came for them,
silent and smooth. Angels move
and do not stir the air--
a lesson patients should take to heart.
My profession has been pulled apart
and sewed up clean. No more
hauling bodies to the Thames
once they're close enough
to the brink. We do things official now.
I have two green tablets with my drink,
just plop them in the dregs.
They glitter like snake's eyes
in brackish water. Now
I can work all night, damp with juices
from the jungle-fruits of organs,
death sliding ice cubes down my neck.
Hurry, hurry. I will not falter.
I cannot spare worry for the things
I cure, nor keep the contours
of their lumpy faces in my mind
beyond a moment. In the darkness
of the body garden, Chinese white
will do just fine.