Strange Medicine

Next came trickling a series of surgeons. It was a rough experience, apt to include despondency at odd moments, like at the state fair, when you wore a crown of codeine and a dress made of reindeer tears. Then, at seventeen, came rites of passage and endless bottles of beer. I fell in love with negative ions and the smell of rain. An air charged with shadow. Lightning in the veins. When the poem first arrived it was starchy and anemic and we had to drag it out of the classroom into the open air where we could resuscitate it. I battled for twelve years against discouragement, poverty and debt to sustain it, to keep it going, to climb onto it with the help of a stepladder and a friendly reflection named Chacha. When the landlady discovered a dead baby in my closet, and she believed it to be her own dear William whom she’d buried the previous week, I was fortunate that the face was still intact and that anyone could plainly see it was a ventriloquist’s dummy named Johnny B Goode. I’m not that rash, and when called to do an operation, I bring a drill and a dueling pistol. It is an art to secure an accurate history of wax. Sooner or later – insensibly, unconsciously – the iron yoke of conformity is upon our necks: and in our minds, as in our bodies, the force of habit becomes a sport bra, a kind of steerage for fatty tissue and warm ocean currents. Do you want to boogie? While subject to the laws of logic, I believe that cross-examining a strawberry depends entirely on the technical proficiency of chewing. Knowledge of the significance of physical signs alone is useless unless the river flows over itself and combines revelation with treasure. And by treasure I don’t mean rubies and Anglo-Saxon helmets, I mean emptiness, spicy, lopsided, sparkling emptiness. The kind you don’t have to launder and fold because it doesn’t exist. There’s a close analogy between clinical music and medicine. Just imagine hearing Randy Meisner sing “Take It To The Limit” as the propofol kicks in. One may know harmony and counterpoint, but without the crackle of an index finger on your skin the softness of a woman’s back is just geographical. Technique in music produces beauty of tone; in romance it secures accuracy of data. There are many sources of error in diagnosis; you need to tell the difference between a thigh and a vestibule, a rib and a nasturtium, or a breast and an afternoon in Provence. Think of the penis as a value-added activity increased at each stage of its performance. The vagina as a tray of Andalusian silver. And isn’t a head really just a roller derby of bad attitudes and snappy punchlines? It’s also a nice place to put hair. It is here that the poet steps into the sounds straining to make themselves into elevators, throbs of exaggeration, emotive locomotives on the shiny rails of the marvelous.