Vancomycin and Ceftriaxone drip from bags
Into the PICC lines of patients
Who rest in mismatched recliners.
This room reserved for victims of infectious
Diseases that once meant certain death:
Slip of the barber’s razor or a festering boil
On the neck or nose. Fever boiled
The brain to mushy grey bags.
Coolidge’s son at 16 met his death
Of a blister on the tennis court. Patients
Shivered in the grip of their infections.
Yours: Streptococcus veridan mitis reclines
Normally in the mouth or gut. It wreaks
Havoc if released into the blood to boil
Its peculiar soup of lethal infection.
Here everyone is hooked to bags.
They shuffle magazines, thumb phones. Patience
Is needed when the spectre of death
Infests the gloomy clinic. The death’s
Head of an old man with cancer reconciled
To the chemo’s Janus-face. How the patient
Whirls in a hurricane of boiling
Treachery. He huddles in a blanket like a bag
Of skin and gristle. Eyes bright with infection.
The gunshot gangbanger fighting the infection
In his leg smirks at death.
A skull is tattooed on his bicep where the bag
Slides its concoction as he reclines
Impassively. His veins boiling
With rage. He is no fucking patient
Is what his eyes assert. Impatient
With this bullshit. Foiled by an infection.
You imagine that the atmosphere is boiling
With microbes grinning with the death
They carry. You ease back to recline
In the mercy of an emptying bag.
This baggage, the death that lives
Within the infected body, boiling
As you recline, the inevitable patient.
