medical exam

a woman's nerves have exhausted to a trembling lump of wet dog,
her unbridled pigeon hearts blipping quickly across wires.
a maddening woman
who told me we were the rancid, boiling contents of our stomachs
and nothing more. she thinks she's a bad case. she said

                i get tired of eating. a coerced want pulls my jaw down
                like elastic overstretched; the sinews sing and thin, threaten to snap
                and make me half-headed, a skulltop bobbling with no home for my tongue.
                my nostrils have also been forced open, their internal skins steamed off
                for a caked-blood paint that oozes and crusts. more and more i look
                digested, i do fume, and it kills most small things. it's for the devil to say
                when- frogs make melancholy, mosquitos an ear-ringing i would call dementia
                and you would call humidity. this isn't getting us anywhere. i am not that
                diagram, skinless as i appear. i would get x-rays but you'll use them against me.
                i mean, call me a bird or call me a man, you'll still find a misery pulp
                confection-cure in blistering pink. apparently you're the best Disney-science the
                clinic has to offer. last i heard though, intimidation doesn't medicate.

                look, hunger and breath are a choice, a weak one, only a parasitic convention to
                gauntly live off and eventually die from. who knows; maybe it is just a wheeze.


i remembered her from rumors and second-hand gossip before i saw the charts,
and know this gorgeous mass of sopping flesh
to be an untrue distillation.