Anne Sexton - August 17th lyrics

Surely I will be disquieted by the hospital, that body zone- bodies wrapped in elastic bands, bodies cased in wood or used like telephones, bodies crucified up onto their crutches, bodies wearing rubber bags between their legs, bodies vomiting up their juice like detergent, Here in this house there are other bodies. Whenever I see a six-year-old swimming in our aqua pool a voice inside me says what can't be told... Ha, someday you'll be old and withered and tubes will be in your nose drinking up your dinner. Someday you'll go backward. You'll close up like a shoebox and you'll be cursed as you push into d**h feet first. Here in the hospital, I say, that is not my body, not my body. I am not here for the doctors to read like a recipe. No. I am a daisy girl blowing in the wind like a piece of sun. On ward 7 there are daisies, all bu*ter and pearl but beside a blind man who can only eat up the petals and count to ten. The nurses skip rope around him and shiver as his eyes wiggle like mercury and then they dance from patient to patient to patient throwing up little paper medicine cups and playing catch with vials of dope as they wait for new accidents. Bodies made of synthetics. Bodies swaddled like dolls whom I visit and cajole and all they do is hum like computers doing up our taxes, dollar by dollar. Each body is in its bunker. The surgeon applies his gum. Each body is fitted quickly into its ice-cream pack and then stitched up again for the long voyage back.