A Visitation with Doctor Bones (For John Berryman)

Eyes peeking out pain from sockets

as the catheter goes right off rocket

past the unimaginable shock of birth.

Spread thin like salad dressing

by the American Medical Association.

Served up for billing purposes.

Let me be your gravy train.

Let me be your next victim

of the artfully intelligent artificial

laser-guided Davinci surgery machine.

There's not even a purr,

Doctor, do you concur?

Having already navigated

your impersonal professional gatekeepers,

read your data-driven beepers, soaked, no,

deep-fried into molecular

Sauce of Information

Inflammation A-la-Mode,

do you concur, Doctor Bones?

When I was young if they cut you up,

gutted you like sea bass, oh, they had class,

they stuck you in a hospital for your broken ass,

with nurses & smiling feces faces

shaped like bed pans, an energy

almost as bad as the airport,

but they didn't throw you out

on the street just for sport,

doctor, do you concur?

Meet the new cruelty.

Culture that consumes.

Keeps you live long enough

to let you die & die & die,

splayed across the operating table:

Doctor, what are the words?

Am I oxycontin able, pain pills

for the electronic staples?

A feast for your gauzy tray ...

Doctor Bones, am I going to be okay?

On Tolleson, Arizona When You're Dead

Chart a course to Starbucks.

Keep an eye out for bathroom crashers.

Hub of liberal-o-cracy, just a haze away

from Monument Mountain,

where the first surveyor's meridian line

was struck in the "arid zone" region,

at the confluence of the Agua Fria & Gila ...

I realize, this is more than just vaguely journalistic,

as a fact, but when you're deceased,

just can't follow the facts. And it's more

than just the loss of fertile soil or irrigated fields,

the flash-in-a-pan for gold roll, now so old,

... here comes the espresso rush, the touch

of Tolleson turned into parking lots

for trucks & gas stations & big boxes

so full of slaves all they can do is crave

the only corporate transactions

this cemented fabrication can provide,

words flowing in every direction,

free as birds, oh, the words, the words ...

See the drift of construction workers

in orange jackets, grimly greeting the morning

central caffeine station, looking for the cosmic bus

right on out of here, past the barrier reefs

of castle-crates big enough for industrious kings

who hot-branded the compromised wetlands

on my two-wheeled alchemical trek

& nobody here is getting wet ...

Who cares what the invisible see?

The Canis Latrans in me still runs free.

- Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Books