A Follow-Up Poem for an Inspiringly Horrific Medical Misfortune

 Whatever this life is, whatever makes up our existence, whatever drives us on and fuels our actions of varying atrocities and increasingly rare acts of love, is it really worth it? 

Asymmetrical 

Emerging naked from her skull

Vivisected

Tiny organs pressed up against slimy glass

Crack of light 

Smooth gliding down, beginning to feel 

Her tumorous lump of congealed fingers

Twitching at the marriage of broken specimen jar

And puddles of formaldehyde 

Not enough digits

To count the bugs trapped in her ruptured lungs,

To trace the spiraling streets of used needles 

Pointing broken right angles 

Towards the asymmetrical Angels 

Portending her in utero cranial rearrangement. 

Cobwebs of phlegm

Sinew sewn by narcotic cockroaches  

Coating new cocoons 

Smashing fountains of laughing cherubs

Birth canal in the sky shudders 

At the cellular insects 

Staging their stormy revolution

Ploughing the long-since soiled,

Defiled,

Diseased,

Maliciously reproducing 

Land of screaming hills 

The lacerated and chemically altered earthly thighs 

Of Mother Nature

Preparing the lingering swarm of trauma 

Heat of quivering, infected surgical incisions,

Your wrongful becoming 

Out of the electrifying membrane hallways 

Of barely developed consciousness

As sepia-soaked photographs heave 

Golden frames launched across the room,

Mother tears nursery brick-a-brac asunder

Cruelty of nature squeezing out 

Her all-encompassing wails 

Carrying you and your sister

Further into the jagged, rotten void 

Of creation. 

Your sister’s headache grows

Motherhood scratching at the fungal roots 

Wrapped tightly round her fallopian brainstem 

Nonsensical x-rays shadowcast

Bleeds down the surgery theater walls 

Tiny neck swings heavy between wooden bars 

No need for restraints, 

The snapped wrists won’t move. 

Beginning to pass through

Spreading crimson dampness coloring the scalp,

Tumorous pregnancy swinging upside down

Under exploding stars of examination lights

Like a misshapen, pinkish pendulum,

Tiny eyes, lost of any color, roll upwards

Towards the plastic pores leaking from the sterile ceiling 

And disappear. 

They’re going to have no choice

When they’re greeted by your flowering deformities 

The amniotic veins spiral rivers out of

Your shared forehead

Infant strands of dried hair in decimated patches

Preparing for rebirth 

After the inducing forceps,

They are going to have to 

Force you 

Out. 

What little remains of your sister/mother,

Whatever the doctors can suture back together 

With brand new metallic pieces of skull 

And lifelong prescriptions of useless 

Unfortunatly life-saving chemicals

Through fetid tsunamis of alcohol 

Reconstructing mother, 

The memory of you

And your mock lifelessness,

Inability to resemble anything close to modern man, 

Will remain evermore 

Remain as a pulpy, blossoming reminder

Of all that unseen human horrors can be,

Of what frail, mangled remains can still

Constitute as a life

And why 

None of us 

Deserve to endure. 

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