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This poem is not for the squeamish....this was a particularly bad day at the hospital..
The largest pool of blood
had been carelessly wiped away,
so the surgeons wouldn't slip
as they labored like insects,
their claw-like instruments
probing away at the hole
they'd created over his heart.
"He blew the lid off the pump,"
the anesthesiologist explains,
a humorless chuckle in his voice.
The man lies on his side under the drapes,
blood dripping relentlessly from his nostrils,
a giant red bloom saturating his pillow,
and forming dark rosettes on the floor.
Alarms signal on and off,
the monitoring equipment confounded
by the bloody fluids backflowing into the machinery.
We stand nearby, waiting hopelessly,
our equipment useless in these circumstances,
no technology needed to evaluate
the success of this operation.
"You may as well forget about this one,"
the surgeon snarls at us.
I stare at the man once more,
wishing I could wipe his face,
and place a clean pillow
under his poor, doomed, unconscious head.
We check our gloves for bloodstains,
then unplug our machine and roll it away.
A silent vision of his wife receiving the news cycles in my head,
while I speculate absently on how long before
those bloodstains cease to appear
when I close my eyes.
1/10/98
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in memory of Mr. D
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