POINTS ON THE GRID
George Bowering
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HOSPITAL
Four hundred gluteous maximus bloody injections a night
pushing it in and yanking it out
the little nurse staggers home every night
her right arm ready to drop off!
Out of sodium pentathol dreams in buttermilk ward
the broken emergency skulls and belly bandage emergent wakers
remember operating theater nightmares
and the spinal injection wish to slip away and die in sheets
Seeing doctors in bloodflecked aprons flicking by mausoleum doors
in gloomy nightlight hallways filled with wheelchair creaks
coughing old men in blue bathrobes shuffling to the lavatory
nurses crackling in uniforms that never felt sweat
They record forty born into wailing delivery rooms
their platoonery cries unheard by fourteen delivered downstairs
to the icy rooms of locker doors filled with bare dead feet
useless moving of naked things on silent ball bearing wheels
where even the ants and spiders have been disinfected to death
X-ray girl flopping crushed arms on the table like butcher steaks
shooting silent secret hospital rays thru aching bone
twisted and inhuman hitched to a shoulder
portrait sitting in an ambulence siren studio of police and blood
It is the sterilized ghetto of unbelievable brothers in pain
little bloody haired boys with huge bandages over eyes
alcoholic nightclubbers lying face up with steering-column in chest
screaming immigrant fat old stinky women with mysterious bed covers
haggard old collapsing crones wheezing under draining blood bottles
stretcher borne teenage drunks followed by hysterical love kittens
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Ghetto? It is the world the whole world lives in hospital
Nehru, Khrushchev, Kennedy, Castro,Mao, all bleeding emergencies
everybody lying on beds awaiting horse needle injections
thumb punching their signal buttons to no buzzing lights
the nurses all pallid in beds down the hall
The world is hospital and all its people poor invalids
bedpan sitters and whimpering enema tube acceptors
sterilized and clean victims of the clean bomb of health
bedsore twisters and eaters of limp unbuttered toast
unsuspected one hundred percent healthy targets of mass hypochondria
Babies explode the population and pyjama clad workers
sweat frantically building new pediatric wards wings extensions
before they can die other workers building morgues of unrest
wheelchairs spanning continents of hospital
world government of hospital to executive chamber
of psychiatric hospital to mass annihilation of world religion
of hospital the father the son and the holy ghost of hospital!
Hail hospital full of grace hospital blessed art thou
our hospital who art in heaven our hospital right or wrong
our hospital give us this day our daily bread hospital
for thou art the kingdom the power and the glory amen!
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