when you are in medicine,
medicine is the world.
when you leave medicine,
the world becomes the world.
and the world feels vast
and you feel small
but you feel like you can take it all.
[Featured Image from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license]
Tag: medicine
mariana to everest
How can I take in Mariana to Everest And battle Time, when she thinks she’s the cleverest? Here’s a curled-up baby, damp and crying Blinking with its black eyes at the room Every eyelash, fingernail complying With the human blueprint from the womb. Here’s a wrinkled shell, her soul still beating Even after AIDS has gnawed her flesh How to live when all of life is fleeting? How to age, when birth appears so fresh? How to love, when lovers die tomorrow? How to rage, when justice walks away? How to grieve when tears don’t lessen sorrow? How to see the weave within the fray? We must follow creature intuition What humans did before we managed fire We must understand another being’s condition And do our best to give what they require. We serve our human sisters and our brothers We cannot always choose their paths through mortal night Touched by the ancient calling: healing others It’s enough to lend our steady beams of light.
broken thing
I am a broken thing now All of my feathers are frayed I hold a glass in my claws And shiver under its weight. The poison that heavied my soul Was a slow, thick drink. I was baptized in human tears Over a hospital sink. Or maybe I was drowned with human blood and hair I can’t distinguish exactly (but it smelled like hospital air.) I cannot watch sad films See the actors’ broken eyes Because my broken back Hauls the weight of their actual cries. The fiction is no longer fiction It’s wrenched itself off the page But real fiction’s worse than fiction Since nobody filters the rage. Nobody gives your hero The extra chance they deserve. They beat your hero with a bat And crush them like a nerve. They burn your hero with matches And go out to watch the game You document the wounds and regrets And remember your hero’s name.
universal donor
I hate it I All the thinking I hate about the facts the lists no thinking that is about the pattern of the veins on a leaf Fake thinking dead brain no reason to think; it is in scientific fact actually about inserting that five-thousand gauge lance into the throttled vein of a druggie So tired that nonthinking becomes thought becomes effort slogging through moist warm suffocation air leaking pressing into the nares suffocating Forced here there are cotton balls in my ethmoid air cells there are frogs hopping on my tympanic membranes there are leeches sucking blood straight out of my abdominal aorta There are small carefully selected sea urchins and metal wedges inserted in the sulci of my brain Electrified by eels swimming in my cerebrospinal fluid Other ribs of other animals are sharpened and then placed carefully in my own intercostal muscles as punishment Not quite piercing my lung pleura I react to the xenograft but it can never be removed: That Is The Rules. Other animals are crawling up and down the walls why is it always small animals crawling on the walls? I wish I could pull one person for walking side by side with me Holding my hands with both of their hands But my hands have no nails anymore: they are peeled Instead of nails I have bleeding stumps The bleeding stump of the small boy injured by his cousin in the door with the bone sticking out of his shortened finger moaning through the ketamine it was not deep enough I have accumulated all the injuries That is why I am here I collect them all that they may be replayed over and over again on my own body and on the bodies of the people I love, in my nightmares in my daydreams and there is not a single person here who would deny it – that they have this experience – except they all deny it, lies to cover up their carnivorous porous wilted souls, they refuse to realize that they are just here also to soak up the blood with their blood, to graft the skin with their skin Nobody is a healer who is whole For you must give away small pieces of your soul like chips flaked off dry low-quality clay They will mix you in with sand and bake you sleep-deprived until you shred off, a universal donor One day I will look in the mirror After taking a pee in the disgusting bathroom that has toilet paper strewn about in fragments And I will see dead eyes staring back.
It will be like a guidewire
It will be like a guidewire Clear, straight path to follow Since we are all of the same caliber. But no! Blood clots mistakes sharp turns extra branches atypical anatomy Who said all the bodies were the same? Lies. You will bend until there is cursing And still you will get stuck And break And none of it is your fault For there is a system which must fit everybody And by fitting everyone, nobody fits perfectly. No patients No physicians No students They call us learners but we are all learners We are all broken behind the guidewire Covered in blood.
stethoscope
It’s odd That even A stethoscope Feels heavy after a while.
hyperinsomniac
Blood spilt beneath the hospital bed Tracked by clogs across the floor Blinding lights bleeding panicked voices Statue mute helpless overlooking “Someone take the twins.” The uterus She screams when they push the medicine. He cries when the cancer lung Twelve family around the dead body frozen nameless No family only nurse with HIV+ when she succumbed. “11:15 AM” the nurse he said declaring the dead. Why do I feel like prey? Pray. Intersections with those powerful claiming power With those hungry claiming ignorance. All the organs of the body laid before me I am either a god or an imposter. Sleepless nights Seeing my family with a liter of blood beneath Hearing all screams echo in my Hearing all Hearing Draining Drowning 2 liters of blood on the floor adrenaline. Stop.
balladrael 
