How many times have I fallen to the floor?
Dreamt of crawling with stitches tearing
Cuts into my fading flesh back on the slab
Each time I transgress still, patients wake
Perform a live autopsy on us kicking back
Do a psych eval on a brain dead rat
Get an order by court, keep experimenting
Am I fit like the rest resting on victories?
Free of disease before responsibility
Who will be my supervisor as assurance
Making sure I tug the line on disorder?
Making me feel dangerous by suspicions
Should visits continue till cracks show?
Inches thick between hands pressed
Shock invigorates immature muscles
The glass is wired fencing everywhere
Frankenstein lives for shocks, dies by touch
To be seen & ignored or a monster brewing
See me well-strung than handed among you
Less grand than invisible tendons untaut
Snaps as pitchforks thrust by good samaritans
How to bleed Frankenstein’s lamentations
Before he shorts from the borrowed dreams
What’s see-through but still beating?
Dense skin to a chambered pump poked?
Torches crawl up like flaming caterpillars
Out the back, run to the forest, Frank, beware
The skies have eyes like satellites
Blend in among the disordered orderlies
A dream when I’m served on the silver slab
The main course to feed someone’s pride
Consuming resources of friend & county
To feel like a fierce person, I am cut open
You’ve rooted around my nerves for years
With white-gloved service finger my amygdala
Hallucinations of Frank meeting Shelley
I’d shout, “take me back or give me ECT!”
But living has strings attached by rings
Take out a stitch or rig it to blow
Radiation will radiate loved ones deep
No organism is an island but can be a fuse
Blow us to kingdom come
Like Pele gone mad with haute couture
Stay still on the table, dream in reverse
Every slice only lasts a lifetime
Tell yourself you can’t feel any pain
When you are dead, good or bad
Who cares
Will it be worth it?
When every good pain is dead?
Tender tendrils finding no way in
Satisfy something dying to hurt?
Other than myself
It matters who suffers friendly jabs
It’s better to lie still and study their moves
Even hyenas & jackals tire of the table
With scalpels & fangs sheathed by order
You may retire leaving me unsutured
Bored with the cost of validation
Give me time to sew myself back up
If that day ever comes
Zip it tight this time from intruders
You took over my fear center
Vandalized its halls & trophy case
The new raw look grows on me
I think I’ll keep it damaged
You took my will to struggle
With a fistful of my dignity
Dignity grows back if insult free
Surrounded by care & love
Micro-blackholes pretending blindness
Sanctity of equality among life’s Congress
Known by all but our race our pride
Our fall when eye will lift to the mess
Felt keen when betrayed
By love turned off is the darkest
Cutting bait & ruining lives
Separating rather than reuniting
Prodded prisoners of war on a mission
At the forefront of inmate healthcare
Nose to the righteous grindstone
Revealing humanity’s bloody depth
Rarely reveling the heights impossible
Resigned to choiceless endurance
Holding breath below midnight & bone
Imagined Everest flatlining on pink clouds
Like a stroll on my crooked back
Back on the surgeons silver slab
Cruising on the laminar flow of control
Still as life examined further & further away
Fresh with perspective alternating polarities
Like watching ceiling fans spin, catch a blade
Object versus subject
Subject versus object