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The Experiment
The stethoscope is cold making goose flesh on your abdomen: it was a
time of shivering.
Why is it that climbing on the examination bench, too many people
looking on, answers no questions, only makes you want to clamp
hold your eyes.
They seem to have found something they wanted, the answer to why they
wanted you, but now they carry it away on a tray.
A syringe, again a syringe, one day withdrawing something, the next day
injecting something. Some thing changes in you. Something you
were goes away.
They said, Put on the gown, Dear. Put it, do it, what the doctor said,
Dear. There's a dear.... But the gown does not enclose you, it does
not hide what you want hidden. That has been taken from you.
Now all the samples of you spin in a centrifuge of years. Like children left
on a merry-go-round too long, too long, will they ever know which
way is up?
Something about the experiment left you feeling weak in your heart, your
mind. Now, even your bones flock to their fracturing.
Decades later, though it is not a cure, you get to tell your story.
You have scratched in tiny letters on the spline that held the eraser to your
pencil a single word: Heal. You have torn the rubber away. Your
language will not be stopped
for Beret E. Strong