e r
Didja ever notice how pathetic white can be
from the chuckling chalk of fluorescence
(cool and cunning and unamused)
blurring your skin
as you double lurch from post-vomit stomach lockdown?
it catches you in the room, waiting
clutching to the plastic bowl, and thinking
Yesterday it held a salad, and two weeks ago
tortilla chips
and now, it sits in your lap
an expectant father
waiting for the birth-belch,
Waiting.
we sit, waiting. small shift crew of strangers, less than ten.
we sit, submarine pallor in the parlor room
silent running
missing portholes to check for the
depth charges to drop.
television in the high corner
unreachable, unchangeable.
it too is paled, or perhaps, shamed into dimness
volume soft enough to not really be heard
and not loud enough to mask conversation
waiting alone
I am smiling in the fluorescence
bland cracker illumination settling stomach and mind.
I am eyeballing nurses, disappointed in their pillbox hatlessness
seeing them stare in perpetual slouch,
a medical practiced naval gaze
Zenning out the room with patience
and therefore I missed the entrance of
the boy wonder.
wearily and warily he wore the shock-smock
blank colored, collared by his steth
exhausted from, what? Bicycle puddle jumping?
stealing home in a little league final or
sneaking a late peek at a skinemax double feature
or arriving teenaged in a med school
and getting doogie howitzered
–
murmuring to the admitting nurse
who admitted with a nod
his quarry:
The madame was waiting.
Middle aged, eyeglassed and non-descript
stroking softly like a pretty pelt
the adolescent jacket in her lap
alone, and waiting
and the doc approached (circled, really)
and she looked up
just in time to meet his gaze
as he gulped grey air and uttered
"Er."
the mono-syllable swallowed the room,
monolithic, Kubrickian, imposing,
immense in its idiocy, before tumbling down
somewhere in the thin tile
beneath her feet
the morpheme injection in the vain
attempt to inform, and instead, infecting
the sterile hope she benignly tumored
and I sat there, two seats removed,
wishing for a louder tv
as she sat there for the doctor
waiting.