I Radiate

Cranial drain

the fluids from my brain

Sop it up with a piece of stale bread

            Can you taste my dance of medical

            tests, florescent lit and dizzying?

            Can you taste my mouth

            when they call to say

            nodule in lung in breast in skull

I seep open

I mourn

Go ahead, expose me

Tear me open

Rip off this flimsy paper gown that

shrouds me like the ghost   I am

floating through hospital corridors

through chambers with automatic

doors that open and close on whim

on gurneys that always smell

the same

Go ahead, drain me

I’ll radiate I’ll radiate

I radiate

I shine I shine from that hole

they burrowed in my belly

I shine so damn bright the hospital

staff can barely see me

I seep open

I disappear

I radiate

I radiate

Cartilage

They put it inside of me

It was never mine.

But it became

            mine.

I own these chalky white pills

I cut them

in half, I crush them I crush them

Milky powder

run down milky spine

I pull it out of my mouth

keep pulling and pulling,

and it keeps coming

out of my mouth, like the

magician with the colorful silk scarves

            pulls it out of his sleeve

I pull it out of my mouth.

But I pull too much

too much out

            The stuff they put inside of me

            comes out

I cut it

Cut through the cartilage

            It softly snaps

like the part of the chicken’s carcass

my mother used to pick out

pick out for me to eat

I bite

I cut

I tear

I crush

This part that isn’t mine

Awake, I Listen

I wake to listen;

Empty, I echo

You poke and stir

do you want my tongue ?

            dry and suckling the water out of sponge

 Tear off my voice

do you want my half-brain ?

or perhaps a bit of blood ?

            you take, take, marry it, marry it, marry it

Needle into soft belly

the medicine burns through capillaries

Empty, I echo

I am terrified by this dark thing

Inside

            of me, of it, of what, of  me                      inside

            this dark thing

They tend to my sickness

I have an audience

a choral performance of beeps

This is a performance

“Watch me! What me! Look what I can do, daddy!”

Tears drip and thicken

            sanguine saline

this plastic mattress

this plastic bin of piss

this plastic tubing

these plastic wires, crooning to the nurse’s station

this pained woman beyond

            blue shroud vomiting into basin & she, calling out for

            more morphine

Empty, I echo

8.25.15

HOLDING strongest bird

across my chest,

I take more

Spring’s wind

Construct a bed

Construct a boat

metal parts, metal pins, and bone

stapled skin

Some kind of freedom

lifts in wind

this in wind

We begin

We corrode

            learn to walk again