Saturday, September 21, 2002

this isn’t really speaking of

this isn’t really speaking of it - it’s remembering and memorializing.

the room was white, uncompromising
curtains cutting me from them
they stood and fretted by his bedside
proud to tears of how he’d fallen
broke it clean just like the big boys
one was laying there three feet
and one thin plastic curtain over
smacking my two feet together
to the rhythm of the throbbing
fingers hanging like chianti
dusty in its netted bottles
fingers drained of blood and feeling
bulging in their wire cages
as my wrist and arm hung thickly
thickly passed the aching hours
liquids pumping through my sysyem
through a #14 needle
filling me lugubroiusly
but the flame is everburning
it, the center of my being,
it has taken over all
all other things come back to it
suspended from those rusting traps
so near my face i hear it crackle
from inside my purple flesh
and beyond it, high school hero
asking them to rate the pain
he can expect to feel next
his voice a whispered waver whine
his mothers eyes are full of tears
she turns away and stares at me
in lycra shorts and sheets of pain
her eyes are full already and
my image bounces off unseen
the doctor is a brooding hulk
his shoulders bunch as he clears room
the lidocaine goes in the joint
just push until you feel the bone
it sets the pain on fire again
and then extinguishes itself
whats left is little more than tension
they tell me low to take a breath
i pull it down and hold it dearly
clutching with my other hand
at something that i cannot move
so i won’t shame myself by flinching
they have got me in their clutches
nothing i could do regardless
now the doctor is in motion
i can feel each milimeter
stretching out against the muscles
that are hours into spasm
leveraging the shattered end
into the fulcrum whence it came
a groan has rumbled from my chest
a noise ive never made before
a noise like meat and nerves and sinew
mom is seeing me quite clearly
watching as my arm is twisted
back into a lonely socket
feel it slip back into place
didn’t know my elbow hurt
until it stopped
i caught my breath
and let my good hand go again
the cast was slithering into place
the chunks were floating near to home
the gruesome lump was back in line
the bruise and swelling less abnormal
time sat on the bed beside me
changing with malicious slowness
someone bumped the plastic curtain
high school hero meets the doctor
thats when mother left the room
but i remained beside his curtain
and went through it again with him