In Which, After Substantial Delay, Frank Meets The Coked Up Doctor And His Shoes Are Mopped By A Complaining Orderly

When I’m gonna get a break?
These people such pigs: woman
whose job it is to clean up after the E-
mergency doc who ripped into the
tourniquets with abandon and splashed
antiseptic and blood
all over the curtained
corner of the ER where she could not
position my gashed thumb conveniently,
I thought doctors
were supposed to know minimum how to do this,
situate the injury for optimal medical
access, but her glasses kept falling
and the coke kept dripping
down her throat as she wrapped
the rubber around the opponens
the short abductor the short
flexor. Enthusiastic pressure then if not
adroit binding staunched the flow
I’d been waiting for hours,
the wound like a mouth burping blood

My doctor sought to secure
an apology for having been called to
stitch me up but
Let the new mouth cut in my thumb
say it’s sorry, you might as well wait
for my wound to speak. I yelped
as she scraped an instrument
along my theretofore uninjured
tendon: my lidocain-numbed
thumb made a tightening jerk,
as by electric shock.
Perhaps I had neglected to
sign something to the
effect of I’m sorry for bleeding on
your floor. Perhaps my doctor,
by application of her scraper,
would animate my drugged hand
in remedy of that signatory lapse.

My nice
clothes, rumpled as a debauched
aristocrat’s, nightclubbber’s hair,
white face and stylish
shoes, these may have provoked my
black doctor’s judgment
that my need for treatment was more a
demand by a Have for resources otherwise
more properly allocated to Have
Nots, who Have Not private doctors Have Not
insurance Have Not, always in line
behind me. Now it’s my turn
to wait except I Have Not
white time nor black time.

I Have a book
once serialized in chapters with long
summarizing titles,
diversion of an hour,
but I’d been sitting for 3 in a waiting room
whose corner television shows a violent commando
injured far more severely than me
my thumb wrapped in Bounty
Little girls whose mothers
Have Not bounty nor babysitters watch
the man die then get back
to their Pez. Playing with candy
in the nadir of the night
A family who’s brought
Triscuits seems unduly
prepared, inured to siege, and another
the first among us to venture
a query of the laconic Eastern European
head nurse with the Chechen stare
has discovered that while
her chart says pain in the knees she in fact
awaits treatment for pain in the kidneys
From the airier hallway they try to shoo me
back into the waiting room
where cinematic weapons discharge
We are going to war
and we are not to be discharged
the waiting injured spread
into the surrounding corridors
limitless need growing tentacles
Every head turns like mine,
up from my book,
each time scrubs walk by, seeking
if not mercy then news though what CNN
has to tell about us going to war
is entwined with the story just ended
of the special ops hero and his blood
is our blood and that’s all the news:
We are going to war, we are in a war
between infinite need and infinite greed,
or maybe the finitude of mercy is immutable
we can’t care any more than we do.
My doctor you’re nobody’s doctor
Once a well-bred girlfriend lamenting my
poor prospects said she needed lots of
luxuries. Luxury by definition, I said
is something you want, not need.
Want is need, she replied
by which I was to understand
that I couldn’t have her either.
A bead
of greasy fat squished out between the
edges of my gash when my doctor pulled
the sutures. You have fat
all over your body, she said, meaning
that I was fat with privilege whereas my studies in
human anatomy confirm that a pad of fat
sits at the tip of your nose, a drop of fat
hangs from your ear
Fat is your clay

Black time and white time,
sunrise only embers
to warm the winter wild,
when rough New Jersey seeks to cloak his form
in the meadows all dusted with snow, Giants
Stadium, the Arena, the Track all
dusted with softening snow as if to hide
holiday pounds.
Most days a bus carries me into New York
on a bridge arcing
over the tall grasses, their brown stalks
tufted at the tops like lions’ tails,
snow like cotton in the dead
seed fluff crowning the weeds.
But stay you in New Jersey at least while the sun
climbs orange and low-heat like something going out,
not something newborn in the winter wild,
past the wet furls of Decemberish clouds.
Stay you while people scrape the ice
from their Navigators and Broncos,
stay you while they quite forget
not to rave at each other as they vie
for the shrinking suburban streets
built when there were less of them and they
were more genteel. This
is the real war right
here. But do stay you in New Jersey while the sun
hides his head for shame of his inferior flame.
A greater sun is my hope, most laserlike, most hot.
One SUV cracked off
another SUV’s mirror and neither me nor
the woman in the broken vehicle
realized till a few minutes later
I got out of my little
moldy coupe, climbed like someone
reaching the top of a cliff. She
descended in a gold velour
track suit, stepped off the pedestal
of her running board, said
These streets are so small, at which I said
The cars are so big: she looked at me like
You don’t have to be a dick

at the exit 151 McDonald’s
the girl suddenly came back to the counter
behind which she’d been assembling a
30,000 calorie order and said “Now wait.
I gotta stop” It was a plea
An older guy engaged me
in criticism against the regime of
pictographic cash-registers their purpose-built
icons replacing the richer system of
multi-use glyphs the power of whose
abstraction comes at the price of having to perform
basic arithmetic;
No, I say. The human brain should
shed the tedium of numbers, should
outsource computation to computers
except the girl behind the register
still feels like a slave
except I Have Not
white time nor black time,
sunset only embers
to warm the winter wild,
when rough New Jersey seeks to cloak his form
in the meadows all dusted with snow