The Compass Rose

Agitated waves beseige
these hours and I’m
slamming my head
on the headboard
of agony’s hostile deck.
Your love is a wreath
that floats in ponds,
a compass rose
unmatched by man.
Bending in a simple chair
is twisters of tendon tears
that yoddle in
the struggle clouds.

The scent of faith
like nostrils of a lily’s bud. 
Your lap, a 
cottage by the sea.
When time has healed
my severed shell,
I’ll squeeze so hard
I’ll break the night
and spread a load 
of sanguine bark.

When old age
descends your way,
usurps your health,
I’ll be the sleuth,
the sword, the heart
that swallows 
fateful’s fur faux pas
and pets gorillas
of the dark.
 

The Hair of Fate in Bitter Eyes
 

This story is too hideous to tell. 
But simple weight of hearing it 
has forced this page to fill itself.  
Every limb and every breath;
every kiss and every move;
every gesture, every stand.
It will bleed on pillowcases--
staining all you own and have.
Julie was shot in the neck and paralyzed
by a man on a private rage.
When she was taken to the ER,
they determined that she would lose
the use of all her limbs,
feel nothing but her nose
and her tongue and the 
cruel hair of fate in her eyes.

There were two horrific scenes
that Autumn night--
and the doctors accidentally saved her,
thinking she was the one 
who would come back to earth 
in the semblance of whole.
They’d never break their rigid rules
to rectify this cruel mistake.
Her family has abandoned her.
They cannot face infected tombs.
Penniless.  At the mercy of the State.
Treated as an irritating rat in a cage,
Julie is prey to doctors’ whims.

On Morphine, oxygen, Demerol,
Valium, dialysis.  IVs are the only
shoestrings in her life at 42.
Drugs the only piano keys
she has at all to render 
bursts of passing comfort.
As one should understand,
she hates the aides, lashes out
at them like lucky ballerinas
who own the stage of hope,
but do not have the grace to share. 

Her bed sores have gone untreated
for more than a year,
because doctors hate 
to come to her home. 
They have grown from 
the size of silver dollars
to chasms in a canyon’s tread--
so deep, so deep her backbone shows.
She has no money;
the wolves of doom have eaten her
and medicine just walks away;
ce n’est pas mon probleme;
the case they plead, oblivion.

She begs for Carrie to pull the plug
and let her die, but a nurse 
cannot exercise such mercy 
without going to jail, 
losing her job and family.
There is no laughter. 
There is no poise.
She hurls bitter obscenities
like Frisbees over summer lawns. 

And here we sit licking days.
Doing nothing to stop
this horrible wreck.
The cemetery slab 
of a hospital bed is
a cruel way to spend a life,
but we are living roped and tied
to quite a set of shameless rules.
Ones we wrote ourselves, of course.
I pray we’re throwing up by now
and cracking knees like Christmas nuts
on absolution’s choir pews.

       
 

Turning Suffer’s Volume Down
 

Weak with need (without a knee),
the laundry doesn’t matter much.
The scars are new and I am old
like carrots growing browner scales.
My corduroy tongue is hanging loose--
flaps that guard a mailbox.
Every step on crutches, now--
sandpaper rubbing tender 
flesh of underarms.
Admission’s envelope is wet;
I try but fail to tape it shut.

The chemistry of hammered dawn:
such simple moves I haven’t thanked, 
I haven’t kissed, I haven’t quite delighted in.
Chocolate-covered cherry motion
melts and shrinks and leaves the pits.
The morning breath of surgery 
a toothbrush will not rub away.
I break the crystal on my watch
and try to speed up hands of stone.

Screeching silent stoic mime 
leaves tire marks on bandages.
I almost hit the pain itself,
but dare not slap its wincing face.
The wrench of will is always there;
I know not where this stubborn sleeps,
but it is there like Kleenex
in my sweaty palm
when suffer’s how the movie ends.

It’s quite the same as axes poised
above the screens of  TV sets--
preparing to slam the evening news 
of rape and war and ugliness.
The pills, a mossy covered bridge
that lets me breathe outside the strain.
A camel’s hump of water gulped,
I cheat and turn the volume down.
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