Friday, February 21, 2025

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?






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