Poem the twenty-eighth: Written on April 27th, 8:05 PM -- The Lady
Spoiler! :
Today was the last day for our doctor,
as she stood up and walked down the aisle
with her gut on her shoulder and entrails
sagging under their own bulky weight as she came
by the counter, placed her head in her hands
and began to weep to a befuddled secretary
who was nevertheless happy to hear a sob story
after spending eight hours pouring through spreadsheets,
ignoring angry calls from a vehement husband,
and looking through the works of Isaac Asimov
to see if Our Lady of Grace could make androids
dream of electric sheep eagerly following their masters
(silent or otherwise).
And the doctor sat down on a chair and stared
at the crack in the ground that had once held a mouse
that, however cornered, was still poisoned
by the whims of an uncaring exterminator
who did his job out of banal sadism and cruelty:
"I am at my wit's end, Elizabeth, as my cousin
with the heart of clay has finally arrived,
but he is weak, his fingernails torn and broken,
his hair falling off in clumps (I think he used glue
to hold them in place), and his body pale and starved,
though he still floats above his hospital bed.
They said he is mad now, dreaming of tsunamis
and the body of a young girl suspended in a tree
that he calls My Sorrows, that she has aged him
like one would bake and crack a painting
or stuff wine at the bottom of a rusty, moldy ship
for decades."
Elizabeth placed a hand on the doctor's shoulder
(cracked from nervously washing her hands
after every half-hour that she spent with her once-beloved)
and whispered a reply in her faint melodic voice,
"Our creations are not always the most stable,
what with my daughter halfway across the world
being tended to by the best doctors in America
as I made a deal the man with the cup of tea
to keep her away from her father, after the man said
that she wouldn't be living for much longer,
just as the young man handed his artist's drawings
to my eldest son before letting a black cancer take him."
"What matters," they echoed in solemn unison,
before the nervous mothers and fathers and children
and doctors preparing antidepressants and calling
a psychiatrist to fix the lady who had tried to fix everything,
"Is that they might alive at all, that our Frankensteins
can persist for even a second longer than our nightmares
would seduce us or have us begin to believe,
as then we have held them aloft on our shoulders
to admire the wide Earth sloping above them,
and raise to grip the heavens, as we all will."
as she stood up and walked down the aisle
with her gut on her shoulder and entrails
sagging under their own bulky weight as she came
by the counter, placed her head in her hands
and began to weep to a befuddled secretary
who was nevertheless happy to hear a sob story
after spending eight hours pouring through spreadsheets,
ignoring angry calls from a vehement husband,
and looking through the works of Isaac Asimov
to see if Our Lady of Grace could make androids
dream of electric sheep eagerly following their masters
(silent or otherwise).
And the doctor sat down on a chair and stared
at the crack in the ground that had once held a mouse
that, however cornered, was still poisoned
by the whims of an uncaring exterminator
who did his job out of banal sadism and cruelty:
"I am at my wit's end, Elizabeth, as my cousin
with the heart of clay has finally arrived,
but he is weak, his fingernails torn and broken,
his hair falling off in clumps (I think he used glue
to hold them in place), and his body pale and starved,
though he still floats above his hospital bed.
They said he is mad now, dreaming of tsunamis
and the body of a young girl suspended in a tree
that he calls My Sorrows, that she has aged him
like one would bake and crack a painting
or stuff wine at the bottom of a rusty, moldy ship
for decades."
Elizabeth placed a hand on the doctor's shoulder
(cracked from nervously washing her hands
after every half-hour that she spent with her once-beloved)
and whispered a reply in her faint melodic voice,
"Our creations are not always the most stable,
what with my daughter halfway across the world
being tended to by the best doctors in America
as I made a deal the man with the cup of tea
to keep her away from her father, after the man said
that she wouldn't be living for much longer,
just as the young man handed his artist's drawings
to my eldest son before letting a black cancer take him."
"What matters," they echoed in solemn unison,
before the nervous mothers and fathers and children
and doctors preparing antidepressants and calling
a psychiatrist to fix the lady who had tried to fix everything,
"Is that they might alive at all, that our Frankensteins
can persist for even a second longer than our nightmares
would seduce us or have us begin to believe,
as then we have held them aloft on our shoulders
to admire the wide Earth sloping above them,
and raise to grip the heavens, as we all will."
Gender:
Points: 24185
Reviews: 299