The bus loops around Vancouver General Hospital and heads downtown.
There are so many sick people sitting shoulder to shoulder
that there are no priority seats left and soon the elderly
are offering their seats to the infirm. Those who are
young and healthy are asked to step off.
To remain onboard I pretend I have several health issues.
Imagine me coughing wet mucus into my sleeve and
howling like a wolf every couple of minutes and beating
my chest with a limp hand. Only pretending to be deficient,
I swear. I make a damn good impression though.
A woman is wearing black capris: one uncovered calf
is veined flesh, the other is smooth plastic.
A man has an apparatus drilled into his skull.
like the monster in Frankenstein.
A soggy cigarette dangles from his lips.
Another has a face as colourless and flat as wax.
Perhaps he has been in a fire and they covered
his raw face muscles with paraffin.
They can do anything nowadays.
The ill, the injured, the dejected and rejected, the maimed
and crippled and handicapped of Vancouver
have been released from their hospital bed, dumped
onto the street. They have crawled aboard bus 17
and they are coming home. They are too weak
to be angry, but they are ugly. They don't wear
Lululemon or clutch Starbucks cups, but they have
canes and wheelchairs and breathing tubes and you
will see them down your street.
You can't say I didn't warn you.
3 comments:
This is darker than your usual stuff. I miss the your writing Charles. :)
Yup going to have to agree with Max that there's definitely an ominous gloom to your writing of late.
Really strong poem though I'd say - very prosey, almost reads just as a straight piece of flash fiction if not for the lines. I always feel it's so hard to have a good, coherent narrative in a poem so I commend you for it!
I can't even say what line or even stanza is my favourite. So many good images. I think a standout though is "Imagine me coughing wet mucus into my sleeve and / howling like a wolf every couple of minutes and beating / my chest with a limp hand". The black humour in it is enough to counteract the relatively heavy subject matter.
Don't know how I feel about the last line though.
Thirdeded. The Vancouver gloom has moved upon your soul. We must telegram you hugs from the East Coast!
On the upside it makes for really evocative imagery and mood. I loved the descriptions of all of the characters on the bus, especially the mysterious burn victim. The whole theme of faking it and resorting to prosthetics and then literally putting on a face really resonated! Faking the cough made me laugh out loud hahaha I could just hear the theatrical wailing at the back of the bus.
Like Marta I really loved the prosey aspect of this poem. While it would make an awesome flash fiction it just has such good rhythm as a poem, especially the second to last stanza ("The ill, the dejected and rejected..."). It limps and halts. Brilliant.
I don't know how I feel about the last line either, and think it could just be cut, since we were never really warned in the first place and it seemed kind of hostile suddenly. Or is this a warning that the speaker is remembering being told?
On an unrelated note, I tried to find something funny and Vancouver-related for you but I only found this:
http://p.twimg.com/AhdrQwzCEAA2M-8.jpg
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