THE SOLE DOCTOR OF THE HOSPITAL CEMETERY
by Justin Patrick Moore

Caulk gums up the cracks
that once let in the light
until the morning falls without a dream,
and the sun cooks the evening rain
off the oil slick streets.

I’m off once more, at it again,
Fueling up on salt and malt and lime
as if to stave off Saturn’s allotment,
as if holding the clock hands
would somehow stop me
from slipping into crime.

In my travels I’ve seen all manner
of hardboiled underworlds,
lost myself in sewers and
smoked pipes in storm drains
then stolen another mans fire
because my own coals
had faded.

The world was dark and dim
after I scorched earth and heaven
with inebriant joy.

As the ecstasy wore off, the world of work
and business took its worship,
taking an axe to the trunk of Yggdrassil
to send out a fax.

so many limbs have been torn,
not by the Maenads in their righteous wrath—
but by a guy in a suit and a tie,
whose telephone wires tangle up the path.

Scorched by lightning I continue down the crooked lane,
The pharmacy just one indicator of the world’s pain;
earth muffin-mother choking on a ventilator,
her chopped-liver lungs
sickened by venom from industry’s fang.
The Satyrs of her forests have become martyrs,
by excavators torn asunder.
What pastures remain, now, for their idyll slumber?

Morphine drips for the wounded shepherd,
a tree is growing out his ear.
He sings like Orpheus,
body lost in the hospital cemetery,
head traveling down sewers underground;

He has torn himself apart in the Abyss.
His own blood is on his hands.
He is in a place that’s been ripped open
again and again and again.

Will Grandmother Spider come to him with scissors or thread?
Or shall he drift, unsewn, through the Land of the Dead?