Our Father

from Miracle Strip by Matt Layne

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lyrics

Our Father

What should I tell you? That when I see him propped in the white bed,
gasping, cheeks flush with fever, hands strong- grasping the rails,

chemotherapied silver hairs curling to form a crooked nimbus to halo
his head upon the pillow, he looks like some medieval saint? Should I tell you

how each day he is martyred anew? How his hands are bound to the bed,
and they spear his side with a tube to repair the lung they pierced when his heart

beat too wild. How they dress him in a thin cloth, his body exposed to the ward
and his head is adorned with a crown of tubing, elastic, and safety pins? How they

moisten his lips with a sponge and hang signs above his head? About the tearing sound
of the curtain when they rip it back to enter his temple where they ask him what he needs,

his reply is quick and urgent and always the same: a cure.

Do you want to hear how the medicine turns his organs against him? How his kidneys fail,
his lungs fill, and how they wheel in more machines to photograph, to monitor, to maintain?

Here, blood is drained, filtered and pumped back into him. Here, plastic lungs breathe rasping breaths
for him. Here, despite a ventilator tube shoved down his throat, his eyes smile as he chokes against it.

Would you care to know how when his eyes well up his wife kneels beside him and gathers his tears
in her soft cloth? Should I tell you how I am filled with a wild grief akin to nothing I’ve known?

How I am desperate for Ginsberg’s soul airplanes to roar over the rooftops and drop one single perfect
angelic bomb on this hospital, so we might yet escape into the streets, free of this sad misery

that is the agonizingly slow and far too fast letting go of one man’s life? Or do you want to hear how
at this late hour, I cling and cry, and I call my father back? How I beg him not to finish this story yet?

How I plead with him for one more chapter before he puts out the light and closes the door?

credits

from Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022

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about

Matt Layne Birmingham, Alabama

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks since he was knee-high to a peanut peg.
I reckon you oughta check him out.