and how do you feel today?

White coats parade through the blinding corridors
Some have faces perched on top
others with patent leather shoes polished to perfection
pink and blue and green scrubs shout orders
codes and meds and labs and scans echo
rattle the walls
Hospital gowns wheel loyal oxygen tanks and IV stands through days and nights filled with coughing and fevers and flat lines
Friends stop coming
Families are too afraid to look
But beds are always full
Every oxygen mask stuck to a nose and mouth
Eyes filled with anguish, faces pale and empty
Those eyes, those faces, turn to me
Grasping hands and speechless mouths plead for answers and ask for hope
But I am not yet a white coat
Nor am I a set of happy pink scrubs
I carry a stethoscope and put my ear to a chest
I dream of hearing answers and solutions and dreams and hopes and souls
But I do not yet have the key
So I hear life
And air
Soon I will feel a wrist and thoughts will come
But for now I walk the blinding corridors
And feel the walls shake
I see masks and tanks and stands and gowns and hands and questions
And I stand in awe
An impostor
A guest
Or perhaps just a traveler
Starting out on a journey
To nowhere and everywhere

phantom pain

memory is studded with darts of truth
if you could would you pull them out?
you know they stab and pierce.
it hurts to know reality.
they hold all the cards
and we watch the film roll
actors moving like puppets on drugs
if they gave you the strings what would you have them do?
what would the puppet world be like if you ran it?
you'd stab the puppets in the back and let them stab you too.
all for some morphine.
did you know morphine makes your pain disappear?
it also makes you throw up everything inside you and then throw up some more until you're a crackly shell and you have nothing more to throw up and you turn into dust with the touch of a feather.

acid rain

Lightning strums the strings stretched across the sky
a melody drip drops onto my waiting skin
like warm blood bubbling up through my insides
bringing me back to life.
an inner awakening of nightmares and wishes
shadows and shapes leaping and crawling through the winding recesses of my ugly and
frightening mind.
pockets filled with curses
like Hansel's stones I leave a trail where I walk
where I think
and where I kill
A trail of horror and of beauty where I lose myself and everything I love and hate.
The sky is green, and I blink once, twice - maybe it is all just a dream.
The flash comes again and for a minute I can see it all -
but there it goes and now
everything is black.
It seems to me that after all,
there is really
nothing
here.