Doctors

Dr. Demerton diverges from strict protocol,
taking out his ink pen and prescribing trephining
for a patient complaining of an itchy scalp.

How many ear aches can one man stand to encounter
before his mind tears into ragged strips,
like a wet napkin?

How many common colds can he diagnose before wishing to 
press each stuffy head down into a basin full of water 
until all complaints subside?

Next door, Dr. Baynedda cures all with a toss of her hair,
or a sultry glance above her bookish eyeglasses.
White canes and old wheelchairs accumulate outside by the dumpster,
while their owners cartwheel home
or read eye charts placed in the next county.

When Dr. Baynedda walks in, she dispenses cures from the pockets of her immaculate white coat,
and nothing hurts, ever, except the sharp pangs of desire
felt by her patients,
her staff,
and even by people in far away countries at the simple mention of her name.

Dr. Demerton feels eclipsed, and a little bit depressed,
watching the misery which teems in his waiting room,
be it ever so common;
be it ever so dull.
He strays further and further from standardized practice,

incorporating voodoo, the herb smoke, and 
non HMO approved pentagrams into his treatments.
But still,

everyone prefers Dr. Baynedda.
One visit, and soft white-feathered wings emerge from their once-slumped shoulders.
One smile from her, and sluggish hearts race,
twisted, useless limbs become supple and strong,
and the dead--yes, the dead!--rise, just to fall at her feet in adoration.

Dr. Demerton gives up practice, becomes a busker in the subway,
with a little fez-wearing monkey he rescued from a lab
by holding the director and his staff at bazooka point.

And Dr. Baynedda?
She wears the uniform of mercy,
the colorful costume of genuine radiance,
and all who see her, all who seek her,
become pilgrims on a holy journey
into Yes Sugar Yes.
_______


 for my own Fireblossom Friday prompt, "I Love A Man (Or Woman!) In Uniform". I think white lab coats count.

 

Science For Girls

Water vapor in the cloud--
Same-same, baby,
You can't choose out one from within the other.

The water drop rolls and rises inside the cloud--
Sun, Moon,
Still call strong and she answers.

Water drop cloaks herself
In more and more of herself--
She rolls again and falls;
The Earth calls, so Cloud and Moon let go,

But still they cover her with themselves
Until the next roll and turn,
Feeling each other in the quick of each other
Always.
______

My Petition To St. Creola

Beautiful St. Creola,
Our Lady of the Sea Shore,
The pockets of your blue linen smock stuffed with dawn clouds,
Intercede for me,
I beg you.

My nights have become unpretty, pungent, abrasive,
Like tar roofs,
Patched and leaning,
Unable to hold the rain.

St. Creola, patroness of all that is lovely and ambiguous,
I cannot decide
Between My Love in the morning, her skin warm as east-facing Italian stucco,
Or My Love in evening, wearing moonstone earrings and making a bird perch from sea ripples and snakeskin.

She is the bootleg water-dove,
The posey nightcatcher.
I am the indigo bloom, and your adherent.

St. Creola, hear me.
The stars turn at your command,
The skies open at your pleasure;
Let there be a rain of cormorants, sapphires, silver dust...
Let there be your own jasmine scent in her dark hair;
Let there be bells,
And within their ringing or their silence,
Her answer.
_______ 

linked to dverse OLN #33

The Healing

I spread five fingers and five seasons came;
I kept the one that had no name.

I closed them 'round the stepchild month;
She felt like love when love is done.

I stuffed the lost one in my mouth,
And spoke things scratching to get out.

The Gypsy wrapped around my eyes,
And by blue evening I was blind.

She wormed her way into my ear,
And whispered quite like you, my dear.

She burrowed deep into my brain,
Sweet and sharp like blade and cane.

But when the sweet bitch found my heart,
She bit and sealed the broken part.

_______

Optional musical accompaniment.

tea

Millicent Menzies-McPhee
Invited me over for tea.

The mood was torpid, the talk was vapid;
The descent into fidgety misery was rapid.

Millicent droned on and on and on 
About her dismal daughter and stuporous son;

Neither was wedded, or even employed,
And of any interest completely devoid.

I sighed and suffered and wished I were dead,
As my mind dissolved and my poor ears bled,

Then, unable to take it, I exploded in laughter,
Took off my clothes and swung from the rafter.

"More tea?"
Inquired Ms. Menzies McPhee.

I said, "You are a tiresome, torturous bimbo!"
As the S.W.A.T. team came and rappelled in her window.

I was removed to the sanitarium post haste,
Which saved her life with not a second to waste.

And the moral is, most obviously,
If you want to have tea...

Don't have it with Millicent
Menzies-
McPhee!

_______

for Ella's photo challenge at Real Toads.

How To Make A Poet (Though Making A Milk Jug Lantern Would Be Better)

I was delivering the mail.
No, the actual mail.
There were steps,
It was icy,
and bullshit bullshit bullshit...

Anyway,
I slipped.
Something deep inside my ears whispered to me:
Whee, whirlybird,
Going down.

I might still have been all right, except--
I landed in the spokes of some kid's bike
Left on the walk;
Then I was dead
Cos I broke my neck just like Mama always said.

Lady come out, lady say,
Omg, call the lawyer.

Then I was floating above my body,
And I thought,
No.
No no no no.
I had almost finished reading a novel, and
I had thawed some hamburger for tonight and
I had a movie that came in the mail,
Set aside,
Like a a potentially distracting
Arranged bride.
So I can't die.

But I died.
I saw souls whipping into the light
Like their hair was on fire.
The love!
(they said.)
The well-being!
(they cried.)

Well, that's not how my experience went...

God looked at my life and then at me and said,
WTF?
And I looked at my life and then at God, and said back,
wtF????
I came back as a cat.

I peed the little potted tree,
I bit the hand that fed me,
I shed and shit and scratched and that was me.
I was angry.

Then I died again, and still,
No love for Shay.
I stood before God in her Radiance,
And was sent back as a geranium this time,
That I might learn patience
And the art of being still.

I was pink, and pretty,
And people said, how nice.
All the time inside I was screaming
GAHHHHH! GAHHHHHHH!
Cos I was angry.
Then some kid, maybe the child of the one with the bike,
Said off with your head, 
And I said
Nothing after that.

I screeched at God, WTF?
And God said back, well, wtf?
I went back as a tropical fish
And an ant
And a dung beetle
And a labrador retriever,
The only one in history that bit.

I died and died and died and died.
And stood before God,
And got the trapdoor in the floor,
And a bon voyage.

It stopped being funny pretty fast.

So, after I was a monkey and a microbe and a
Frozen test tube baby in a basket,
God finally sighed.
One more time, She said, and 
Off I went.

My mama tried to kill me cos
She knew she bore a poet.
But I wouldn't die, not again.
No no no no no,
Not having it.

So I grew,
And scribbled, 
And went GAHHHHHHHHHH!, but
I did it pretty, so pretty.
I didn't love no men, and they didn't love me neither.
I loved some women til it made me cross-eyed,
But they said, we can be friends, such friends.

Then some dweeb at the mall told me God loves me,
And I smack him hard upside the head
With my latest volume.
I beat him
And beat him
And beat him
And beat him,
And that's the most use poetry ever was. 
I beat him, but I did it pretty, so pretty.

I went to jail and they said,
What's your name?
What's your gender?
What's your credit score?
What's your sign?

Then they gave me ten to fifteen years
To contemplate the Divine.
______

picture found on weheartit.com

Dear Red

The Soul selects her own Society--
Then--shuts the Door--
To her divine Majority--
Present no more--

Unmoved--she notes the Chariots--pausing--
At her low Gate--
Unmoved--an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat--

I've known her--from an ample nation--
Choose One--
Then--close the Valves of her attention--
Like Stone--

(written by Emily Dickinson)

Dear Red--
Are you at your table--by the window--
Beyond the Evergreens
Where I beheld You once?

In the Room where you welcomed me--
An old Friend--
As though we had been--for a Moment--interrupted
And so easily--Again--picked up?

They think you a hermit, my Red--
A mouse--by baseboard held--defined--
But you are a Heart--Divine by nature
A Soul in Flame--beyond confine--

Dear Red--I know--She is near as your next Breath--
Yet as Distant--as Persia--or Africa's Nile--
A peculiar Torment--a lifesblood of words
For Her--survives--through Eternity's while--

Dear Red--
I know the Heart--forever in debt--
Written out--put Away--folded neatly, like linens--
I know what it Cost--I know what it Meant.
______
for Kenia's challenge at Real Toads

Note: for those who do not know, or read here regularly, when I visited her home in Amherst, in 2007, I felt Emily there; not in any vague sense, but THERE, and personally. She was glad I had come, she welcomed me, and she knew about my writing. It was, for me, an intense and spiritual experience.

E.D. was in love with her sister in law, Susan Huntington Dickinson (see the book "Open Me Carefully") who was married to her brother and lived next door at The Evergreens. The relationship spanned decades, shows up again and again in Emily's poems ("I Cannot Live With You"), and must have been both sustaining and incredibly frustrating for Emily.

I tried to find the version of her featured poem, above, which seemed to me to be most true to Emily's actual style. One of the things I love dearly about her is that she wrote in her own amazing and unique way, resisting advice to write in a style more in keeping with contemporary convention. Up at least into the 1950s, and even today, editors have changed her punctuation, capitalizations, and even her wording, to make it more conventional. (Why?!?)