Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
JL Jan 2013
I was young foolish and just out of the cookie cutter medical school at the community college.
I work in the mortuary much better than watching the old women who die from cancer
I've spent hours pumping radiation into their frail bodies
"Fighting Cancer"
I watched some die with terrible gasps of blood in the emergency rooms during a long internship
A sheet thrown over
As if we are already trying to forget it happened
Death seemed to touch everything in my life
Regrettably, it has yet to touch my life itself
I am exhausted with the process of death
But... I was both discomposed and
...aroused by its product
The dead were just that
Silent cold white
And we covered their private areas with a white cloth
If not under examination
She was not dead though
The mortician
Warm with long black hair
But almost just as white
She leans over a cadaver before me
Her voice echoing in the sterile
Rubber scented universe of the examination rooms
Her voice settling into the running tape recorder on the table
I check off endless boxes on the clipboard I hold
Only half paying attention
Her scent lulls me
I swear I smell her hair
As if I were at the nape of her neck
Seeping through the pungent and intoxicating scent of formalin
A spark of life in the void
She seems to realize all at once
The gravity of my gazes
She chides
Please Stay Focused
Countless hours we work together beneath the bright examination lights
Sometimes working late into the night
If a terrible car accident were to happen on the interstate

Once
On a dark night on just such an occasion
She enters the examination room in a rush
Approaching a corpse I had already cleaned and undressed on the table
A male somewhere in his early twenties with an unnatural ark in a few of his ribs. I was looking forward to photographing the anomaly for my


Most secret collection

She holds a 20 gauge syringe prepare with an odd violet colored solution
She injects it into a dark black vein in the hand

I remain silent
She stares at the injection sight intently
Bead of crystal sweat falling down her forehead
"We are never to speak of what we may see her tonight."

Her hair pulled into a tight bun
A serious gaze in her dark eyes constrict me
Somewhere far in the dark basement in the back of my mind
A flare of something strange to my soul
fear
I am flooded with adrenaline and she seems satisfied with the dilation
of my pupils and a smile stretched across my face

The corpse
The skin begins to brighten
Oxygenated blood running through starving veins
Then
A sigh
A breath
My hand pressed to the neck
An arterial pulse
Weak beneath warm flesh
The thing breaths its breaths ragged at first
Then faster
She holds a cold stethoscope above the heart
Each beat of it seems to reverberate in her eyes
She stares at me
Both terror and elation on her face
She looked terrifying and beautiful
Her face seemed chiseled of marble
A shadow falling perfectly on her face
Beneath the fluorescent glow
It sits up at a back breaking speed
Its eyes shooting wide open revealing
A massive black pupil in a sea of jaundiced yellow eyes
It's mouth opens wide
And a deafening scream tears through his throat
Reverberating through the two of us for eternity
And echoing among the dull fluorescent halls of the mortuary only for a moment
It's final word
*fate
Shy Shafin FX Dec 2013
A heart that’s filled up like being buried alive |
“Occupational hazards” that slowly poison you |

Bruises getting sourer than
an astronaut’s vertigo |
Bruises are left to be unhealed |

Sorry, Doctor! Your medicine isn’t working

Looking so sipped off and drained
Devoid of any humanity’s stain

Thinking of drowning down

the system that’s already dead and down |
We haven’t heard from them longtime and again |
But please let me take a more cautious,

loyal approach to you all over again |
A slow poisoning of carbide, formalin

to finally having pure, clean cyanidical mayhem… |

No vertigos and no more spinning please |
No vertigos and no more spinning please |
No vertigos and no more spinning please |
Peace with myself at last |
Peace with myself at last |

This is my final epitaph | my choking heartache |

No vertigos and no more spinning please |
No vertigos and no more spinning please |
No vertigos and no more surprises please |

But still what a wonderful feelings I had I remember now |

Such a wonderful heavenly bliss it was |

No vertigos and no more spinning please | (let me steer up to eternal bliss) |
No vertigos and no more spinning please | (let me steer up to eternal bliss) |
No vertigos and no more spinning please | (let me steer up to eternal bliss) |
#Life #Personal #Poem #Poetry #Thoughts #Writing
JL Aug 2013
The eyes should be plucked from their orbits
Submerged in formalin
Stored in a museum for all to gaze upon and know
My love is pure-tried by fire-

The fingers cut off at the second knuckle
The skin and meat picked from them leave
Pale Pale Pale white bone beneath
...Untouched by any other man
Scrape Scrape says the knife carving
Runes and poetry into the finger bones
So that all may know
My love was pure-tried by fire

The ****** knife danced
As in the sleep visions I cried out silently
Gray and muted were the eyes and
The voice was...lost from those lips

I remove the death mask to lick the cold lips of her corpse
Purple Petals that wither in the winter air
The warm cloud of my breath
Filling her nostrils
God breathing breath into Adam's first-rib
A lock of hair I disrupt
Falling from the high place
In Hurried Lust

I wonder at the stopped machinery that lies beneath
Do I dare slip the scalpel once more from its placement
And bring it to bare at the left breast?
It is the doing of another-I am no longer here
Searching for what is lost in the garden of her entrails

Wilting Bloom
I search the throat with my fingers
Reconstructing the final moments
Once more I run my fingers against thread
Delicatley I have sewn closed the gaping slash wound
To the throat warm spray a muted gurgle
Air slipping from the vocal chords disjointed dirge she sings to me
Forgetting quickly my stone ears deaf to such frivolities as mercy
The knife found it's own way through the breastbone

She and I are ancient beings
Our bodies sarcophagus for the true form
Released at last First Breath
Picking pieces of it from my teeth
Nail marks line my fore arms
Wounds tasting of the final throes

For she in peace dances at the feet of Him
Her wings cover her eyes
Her wings cover her feet
Holy seraphim returing  crest raised high
Among the host
The great cycle completed
Tried by fire she is found whole once again

And I await with joy
The eternal punishment
You've once recounted in memory
with that young boy vigor
of a hobby collection of that sort.

I find it fascinating how you could
maintain our feigned interest in naivety.
You kept us so long in silence.

You've kept all these things in
jars and cabinets packed in
tight spaces.

And as little and as inconsequential
that butterfly memory that you kept
in a bright jar up in your attic;

let that ripple strengthen into a wave
but i will never be what you willed
and kept for so long. A butterfly

clipped and dipped in formalin
for your tiny framed collection,
that pride-start, if you even had one.

-19FEB15
JL Jan 2012
My eyes couldn't adjust to the light
Only the green glow of formalin
Breathing in the fumes
Until my lungs are black
The sketches of your anatomy
Bent so strange by the candel-light
A pin *****
Could let the spirits inside me
Open me
I am empty
Fill me with your dust
Wind me up
To be your toy soldier
Taking bullets for you
Taking a knife to belly
You laugh as I rust
*"Jacob, I never asked you to love me, I never asked you to care. I told you I would hurt you
             Use you
             Sell you
              Compel you
******* for the taste
******* for the race
I wanted your legs
Wrapping white legs
The branch of trees
On which a bird will land and a song
I have aleady forgotten
Jeuden Totanes Jun 2014
crush my heart
here, take this rock
smash it quick
this love *****
can't be strong enough
can't be tough

hammer down a wooden stake
end this immortality
i have a knife
come, stab my chest
rip it open
bone, skin, flesh

give me a shot of foul formalin
or a couple of doses
of some lethal toxin
please
do anything
to end this suffering

i must be numb
even just dumb
remove her trails
from this dying heart

under my bed
there is a gun
i will have to ask you
to pull the trigger
aim it steady
i am ready
end this life...
goodbye dear
Kim Denise Sep 2015
I have very sensitive hands
because I just touched our
specimen without gloves and
my fingers are now very wrinkled
due to the formalin
and looking at it,
I was thinking if you would
still hold it even though
it's not smooth and soft anymore,
because in my chosen field,
preserved and fresh specimen
will always be present and it
will always be asked to examine,
even dissect, so my exposure to
chemicals are inevitable that
sometimes, even gloves cannot
provide protection.

Will you still hold my hand
even if it's wrinkly and rough,
even if it wasn't the same,

*even if I'm not the same?
Venarth says: “After alternating with the Erythrai, I climbed the top of the ship, and began to experience changes in my philosopher's dermis, from a permanent continuous present independent of the post-period, leaving the dogma of the numbers that would cause me an existence capable of only obsessed with supporting him, with the weight of a drunken Lepidoptera who spoke to me close to the invariance of the incorruptible dense layer that covered the sea on the cornice of heaven, making them a continual delay of time. The facets of invariability would begin the notorious oceanic areas that fractured when the Eurydice divided the hemispheres, causing them to doze in the time of her crystal ball, up on the crown which would make her base the extra personalities of the sunset on me. The present allows me to eternalize my memories or memorare, of my existential eclipses, making of its faculty to speak of a super conscious overwhelming and constrained to the hermeneutics that invited me to drink Ouzo among the few beings that accompanied me in the height of the ship, increasing its gradation every time a sip multiplied with the puffs of the Hesperides that passed me by, inviting me to bag their naked spring figures wintering, given the temporary stagnation that entered through the hole in my pectoral of the sinister right scapula, where some probes of the Mythical elderberry paused my outraged finite human, who got stuck in my chest when he couldn't apprehend the amount of my second lieutenants who sifted through the Bereshit voices of the Torah, who lamented pre-late and tonal that they never finished, that they became prey condensed from each sip I drank into his Ouzo harvest timeline, tracking the tiny sips that That I would not be able to count, before drinking them, after never having drunk them harshly, thus not understanding the mats blown by the reefs of the infinite twilight sapphire, carrying away the burps, that the naiad Arhanis saw coming out between my central incisors and from my mouth numbed by the heat of Zeus's anger, and from the dawning of potential between fallen, hanging from the sky of Arhanis, holding between the hands of the one who supports him. The clouds and geometric masses in vapors fell on distinctive chromatic ropes and cords of volumes supporting the infinite, which today eliminated itself blinded, falling into the void of an ex-vaporous corporation.

This succession in status of perenniality, made me hold vigorously from the top, as I began to fall into an unknown void where I would meet Elpenor in hypersomnia, but rather, from a song of the Odyssey that invited me to a straw next to him and the liquid chemo of the Ouzo, asking him to give him the worthy food of his oblations and the liquor broth, to make me advise him in the last sip, before the sirens sing, where I would affirm my golden hoplite elbow so that the status of eternity, dispense with the ford runs of the taps that exude their Cretan Ouzo, through the navel that swallows the entire boats and my "Pectoral that puts the stopper of time so that it does not pass supra into infra existentialist"

Elpenor, already burning before him, continued with a glass in his hands, pressing the heads of the Taurus who prolonged substitute immaterial lapses, which turned into ouzo vapor vomited by both, running through the sequence of the masts of the crowns, which it would begin to weaken somewhat  from so much distillation of the vineyard test tube, as it cooled down after a succession of events that began with the severed head of the beginning of the emotional initial moment, in which I am still wounded between crossbows and moments that undermine all origin, under a toast of heavy eyelids that pretended a Bing Bang, before taking the float towards a mound that would allow me to fall into the unsustainable gravitant, in which the acceleration causes me, and that weatherizes everything, even though I am not the one that transports myself. Before Elpeneor, I witnessed three uncorrupted deaths, one with the scythe on his shoulders cutting the fences of the impiety of raising micro-times in the Odyssey, another as a prey of biological dowels that debate science that fall incapable before the granule of the involved brain similarly to the multisectoral questioning of conscious conflicts; and final hunger within my contradiction and inconveniences of the loss of the sense of taste, cloistering myself as I live in its metempsychosis, losing the sensitivity of my hands and trying to leverage my swords and spears, not defending my defenseless body from immortal carcinogenic fears , of a lost sacred soul and in sequence of losing reason of seven times plus another seven that remain for my way to paradise, evacuating primary psychic elements and codes of life that rest in formalin, before those who do not fear revive me when drowning  in Ouzo, for all my phalanx soldiers who live in me still dying in my arms.  Constituting the triple of the human being, which affirms the transfer of certain psychic elements of my body to another after my death that does not allow me to walk in the threads of the dust of my bones that wish to be taken back from the corners, from the old and sticks of the termites that eat my crow. I am still in creationism, dressed in yellow, so that the poet who only ***** and breathes me with his great senses, is closer to Christmas than millions of years I have lived, before the Christmas carol woke me up as a divine child, being only a large hoplite cop entangled in an igloo of Panentheism, deifying me or perhaps semi-deifying me, to house the stars that would walk out of my intellectual herd, creating my own low hills of consciousness, that look through the balustrades of the flint of Saint Peter in their Altozano, self-creating vital, but immanent. Transfigured, I decant my teeth in the crottals, on the carpet before the scarcity of their dilapidated embryos, before the Biblical Revelation that tells me that, among all creatures, I will be the only man capable of daring to apprehend the concept of eternity, in between of the serpents. As in one of the theological versions of Ecclesiastes imploring God: “He has made everything beautiful in my time. He has placed my eternity in the hearts of men”.

When I hail Heidegger after a sense after lingual ..., with the amphora ***** in his philosopher pipe, and with Wittgenstein I ***** half – half brain tobacco. Averaging Newtonian ignorance’s, before an absolutism that are revealed in the universal psychic drama, while God awaits me early in his catechesis, ordered, gummed and omniscient of myself, I am agreeing with the precious perfidious date still in my Eurydice's crown, that it looks eloquent of my new date of birth without a month that fits in any calendar that is known, to then go after the capitol in Athens itself, running aground with my ship after my hurricane, possessing its great reliquary itself Parthenon, with my ship over all this stiff structure that is reborn together with my eternalist suicide "Perpetua et incorruptibilis, in æternum vive"

"... Vernarth, breathes unfathomably and comes down from the Euridience crown, as if nothing had happened, when he sets foot on the deck full of liquors and ambrosias, he joins the others and dances Zorba without stopping next to them
Perpetua  et incorruptibilis, in  æternum lives
anilkumar parat Jun 2021
He was busy debauching
when his world
was plunged into pestilence
and his frenzy froze
and he bobbed about
for months on end
like a stiff black corpse
in a tank of formalin.

Then they put him out to thaw
for a short while
and he emerged flailing
from deathlike slumber,
one limb at a time,
quite like a zombie
howling for revenge.

So they dunked him again
and then again
and gagged him
and silenced him
with multiple masks
that masked his own
carefully cultivated mask.

And so now his visage
has mutated.
he scowls, where once
he smiled.
when he speaks,
no voice comes out
except muffled laments
for friends and lovers
uprooted and thrown
into blazing bonfires
without so much
as a waved goodbye.

But his eyes
O my god , his eyes!
How they speak
a new lingo
quite seemingly strange!
is that a glare
or is that a glimmer?
is that anger
or, as i suspect,
a glint of hope?
This throwback dime
Was dropped on Hulu
by a dame with 80 or more
Revolutions around the Sun
Who happened to be black;
Many shades shy of spades,
Actually.

Race ambiguity
Was the theme of her storied life...

She played her rights card
White through Jim Crow
And segregation
Hiding in plain sight
On the lighter side of town
Where strange-fruit hung
On Sundays,
A stone's throw from
Her White Sulphur Baptist church.

But Laura Nelson's tongue
Called her out
Bleeding guilt and doubt
Through her Southern belle cover.

"You know I'm Black, right?"
She finally told the white vendor
Trying to peddle
A piece of Laura.

"Yeah and I'm Harriet Tubman."
Quipped Sally,
Cackling through missing teeth,
Beady eyes gleaming,
Eager to close the deal.

"I fixed it good with formalin.
Be worth a fortune
At the Clan Rally
In June..."

50 revolutions or so
Ago
A poorly-made woman
Found her soul.

And she's been loudly
Black
Ever since.

AYO

~ P
Steve Page Mar 2019
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses ****** out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she ******
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

by Ted Hughes
https://m.poemhunter.com/poem/lovesong/
Norbert Tasev Sep 2021
Sleeping intoxication like a cataract encapsulates a man's eyes: human prostitution behind me and in front of me! This sand-******* interest-Age is already destroying the rest of humanity! I know very well: the worm-rasp is working more and more modestly in everyone; chew and trample everyone for your goals! Accidental weddings are always a disaster! It is enough to have only one sick fruit in the bottom-flattening world and the contents of the basket are rotting!
 
Manhoods swollen with testosterones, like constantly inflated balloons, would rarely take pictures of perishable reality! Even small-style idiots are inaugurated as a worthy hero of tabloid rumors in assault! Yet the hazelnut-brain intellect reveals recovery! Everyone is already stuck in the gates and he wants to thrive with his hard-working two hands: sloth-scale consom women flock like herrings, chirping among the more moneyful! A tiny object of public laughter!
 
Robber jaws filled with snaps cocktails are already set up, and kangaroos are almost insanely common! Continue to stand stubborn eb-thought! Competing bug nests serve the well-run handle to each other only to be more effective! Lively One-Dilemma: Luxury lifestyles and privileges only for some?! The crowded camp of those waking up to cat lips will kick divinely out of the harness for the last time before going to work! "Perhaps it would have been better to lurk in the solitude of homes than to waste an informant?!"
 
The formalin vapor of comfortable boredom makes everyone lazy and hibernate! Nice digestion s sad vomiting rules over everything! Believe me all this! You have to pact with the nodding Johns otherwise there will be no claim! - Low-cost free lives can end soon! After grazing, the simple job rarely gets a siesta!

— The End —