All right, it's over. With these words
I redeem the human body.
We rise to the surface like parasitic fish,
leap clear of the water and fall heavily back
to shake loose from the depths
the snot in our lungs.
Light, like faith healing these cancerous bodies,
brings us forth into day.
In a school drill, we crouched under our desks,
shielding our eyes and necks with chubby arms.
We sat in rows on the playground to watch the flash
drain color from the sky
when they tested the bombs at Jackass Flats.
At the hospital, the black toilet seat
is split like the thighs of some hairy sex.
A nurse keeps me from falling down
the long, cool tubes where consciousness
is an escaped bubble trapped in the bends of a pipe.
The coriolis effect on water swirls it to the right.
The opposite is true south of the equator
but there are flaws in every system, including the weather.
Remember that durning nuclear winter.
The frozen wings of starched hospital gowns
threaten to carry us off,
but the nurse brings in the choke chains
and we tumble from air,
tumble from water,
tumble from grace.
Virgil, Prospero, Icarus—
we're too close to the light.
Return us to the waxed plain
of checkered hospital floors
with beds arranged according to patterns
where an enormous game of chess is in progress
and the beds are the only pawns left playing.
8/84
Falkirk Center, San Rafael
Another old ascii riddled rescue piece. Date? I'm making them all 1/180. Hopefully I'll find my lost MSS binder. Otherwise there's no hard copy of most of my work for 2 decades. Yikes.
Miracle, I found two typed versions for lines.
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