Doctor's Smoke Jar Poem by Sandy Player

They've put me back together again.
Staples and paper making up for skin,
Each perscription another dry and thin sheet.

The doctor hangs his blood flecked white apron,
His angel suit put away, and he's that man.
The epidermis he transferred is already peeling off, like a napkin.

But I am above men and cats,
You bees that make your hives then sting trees.
I am a sort of wasp-like thing.

A blue mutant wasp whose sting never sticks,
I am left with more unused venom after every attempt;
My brothel where I frenetically infect myself.

I sit on the wood-wormed bench outside it
And slip my eyes into the pages of a catalogue.
They always said I had large pupils.

There is nothing in it that works, my! I've tried.
Now I cannot afford to buy a grave
But here and there the publisher smuggles a new section or page.

Those pages don't glide off quickly like that doctor's,
They fit snug like the benignant hangman's rope
To where my inside used to rent.

My need is just a lighter, or a forest fire;
Heat like that from a mother's sickbed.
Then I can laugh the last word

As they spin scalpels
And an oxygen mask to put the smoke into
A jar on the operating table.