"scrubs" poems
is like no other early morning, man reborn, in the delivery
room of sky blue, the offsetting water deeper bluish hue,
the trim-all-around of the mixed salad greens of the staff's
scrubs as they usher in unity, with no imp-unity, the risks,
while the supervisory sky, disperses cumulus clouds in
peppercorn patterns of white chains, or big wide solitary
brushstrokes on a a ****** canvas, gettin' the feel in the
palm of the heft of brush, the viscosity of the paint, the day's
palette reflecting available colors in order to create a uni~cued
original of what has been painted an uncountable times before,
and before…
tho short weighted, was the sleep of the prior night's restful,
he awakes to the early morning light, the sounds of early
island rouse him, even, arouse him, for the August chill
foretells of the early onset of memory loss of the peculiarities
of this summered simmering, human warming and baking
and natural braking of the slowing of the heart rate, to better
accommodate, nature's hints and hidden reminiscences
of the true purpose of the summer's intervention upon our
collective and unique bottling, our individualized containers,
un~lidded, uncovered, eager for the fuel of sunrays replenish-
ing the length of our lives by the elixir of the summer
it is a chill 63 Fahrenheit at this time of day as we crossover
to the nigh day, from the cooling air conditions of dark,
the occasional helicopter intrudes upon the morning's calm,
the water placid, the geese honking regarding my watchful
rewarding presence, a slew, a bevy, of female vocalists, to
ease this transitory performance unfolding, and though one
feels the existential of his solitary singularity, as he thinks,
nay believes, he is the only one in attendance at this ritualized
emergence, he takes in the cool of, the heat of, the admixture
of both, the clashing integers of each, and he, fully invigorated,
goes silent, for once more, he has uncovered new combinations of
old words to accept and describe a new day's creation, miracle of miraculous, defying the odds of this ventures's success, his own continuance on this sheltered but open all around island implanted tween two tines of land, as if all the surroundings were created just to protect this, wholly holy place…
7:00am
Silver Beach
Shelter Island
Aug 19 2025
Aug 19, 2025
Aug 19, 2025 at 8:00 AM UTC
Where does worth come from?
I've been told my aura is Lavender,
By a man trying to flee
light blue paper scrubs
and milk dripping down them.
He says I'm not suicidal,
Lavender never is.
Dec 27, 2014
Dec 27, 2014 at 12:56 AM UTC
A hymn to paired planethood: Venus hits Pluto
as death, in cold orbit, collides with biology
smashing to fragments: demonic astrology
(more a black hole than a love-star, it’s true though).
Cynical cure for Eve’s womanly grievance
Concupiscent consequence: lust’s bitter fruit –
ah the thought… changing Sin into mere inconvenience.
Margaret sang her seductive refrain
about weeding the garden and progress and light.
Her sisters should view her with scornful disdain
but instead have adopted her murderous rite.
With sang-froid she promoted her racist eugenics
(as if she had never herself been a fetus),
condemning her heirs to postmodern polemics
while nurturing ardent desires to defeat us.
Suppressing the lives that she flushed down the drain
she would liberate Death – and resistance was vain.
As a midwife to modern life (though on the “anti” side)
Old Matron Margie racked up quite a legacy
singing the praises of sanctioned infanticide
calling the shots for the coming sick century.
Planning, quite calmly, to “cleanse” certain races
her zeal was empowered by murderous graces.
She labored to bring us such pearls of subduction:
“dilation and curettage”, “women’s autonomy”
“viable fetus”, “procedure”, a “suction”
Hippocrates retches to hear the taxonomy;
words that turn Life into mere reproduction.
She enters the realms of the ****** and the motherless
roundly condemned by her feminine otherness.
Man’s first protection: the God-given womb
which no infant should have to regard as their tomb.
Dismembered dark cherubs, assembling, greet her
as demons (in scrubs) holding baby-parts meet her.
Long may she burn with the medical cynics
this mother of Moloch, this founder of clinics.
Convenience is king when abortion’s the Queen
and the profits swell big with each nubile teen…
yet the fruit of such carnage remains to be seen.
I send her this song as a funeral wreath
and a card inked in blood. You may read what is there:
“To the Matrix Supreme of our culture of death
from the souls of the infants you slew on the earth.
May your torment increase with the children you bear.”
Sep 10, 2015
Sep 10, 2015 at 9:09 PM UTC
The representative from Ohio
wipes his *** with Jose’s brown
palms after a bout of verbal defecation.
Luckily, Jose’s food truck houses
a small sink in the corner where
he can wash his hands in between
baskets of chorizo prepared
for rich politicians.
Sometimes Jose scrubs so hard dream flakes
rub off of his skin and he throws them
into the wastebasket to be picked
up by the sanitation workers who
eagerly jump like frogs in orange vests
into the waste of Americana. When
the Representative stops by for
a plate of carne asada, Jose’s
dream specks pepper the beef
and his salty sweat flavors
the inside of the burrito. He grills
the onions and green peppers with
a dash of minimum wage and
boils the rice in a mixture of blood
and pieces of his heritage.
He serves the meal in a white Styrofoam
tray and drizzles it with cheese flowing
from an open wound. The receipt is an unpaid
medical bill, the drink an icy reminder
of his future sipped through a straw.
The nightly news tells Jose
the Representative is bedridden
with a stomach infection. He
complains his insides feel like
a million ***** feet kicking the lining,
like unheard mouths with rows of
sharp teeth gnawing at the liver.
Jose to the tv: tonight we’re not starving.
Oct 9, 2013
Oct 9, 2013 at 11:42 PM UTC
I’m sporting this new lipstick
it won’t fade, smudge or smear
I’ll be lucky if it wears off this year.
I’ve got this new eyeliner that’s like
a luxurious, glittering, penciled tattoo
Leong asked, “How do you get it off you?”
I unpacked these chemical wonders
to see if they’ve lost their luster
by being neglected since last summer.
When you study too much, you feel pent-up,
so my compadres and I chose to get dolled-up,
rolling-up to dinner, like beauty queens on parade,
and not just sophomore scrubs trying to make the grade.
Dec 18, 2022
Dec 18, 2022 at 9:07 AM UTC
The world has not been
kind to her kind.
Tormented by her mind,
peace she can not find.
History bears witness
to her mental stain.
Told that her skin is a disease,
she scrubs away the pain.
Wounded and forever alone
in this desert terrain.
Hope floods her thoughts
like summer rain.
The red of her blood seeps through her scars,
liquid consolation caressing her skin.
She is human,isn't that enough?
Oct 7, 2014
Oct 7, 2014 at 7:07 PM UTC
Hey Danny, I droped it twice but this one is just as nice
On the fly a small hummingbird on flittering wings just dusting the room
With dann dust and goodwill.
A quiver filled with curative pin point healing
She is wheeling and dealing
Danielle I presume is the full story.
Acufeel good. Feelgood ancient curative
Sent from the far east.
Miniature
Magic whipping about in sea blue scrubs
All good news .
Never gave me the bluesy tude.
Cool runnings miss danny.
Nuff respect.
A short poem for a big spirit. In. Small spirit
Country.
Seek and ye shall find I am inclined to believe
She has a good vibe.
Cool runnings hummingbird.
See you at the water cooler
Jan 16, 2013
Jan 16, 2013 at 5:56 PM UTC
Asian toilet scrubber girl
I love her
She all brown tan and smelly
I will be happy to kiss on her belly
Nasty thing with hunger in her tummy
I will feed her all I have
She don't know where ugly Beverly hill is
Her ****** is my friend
Soft wet and wild
Child of Asia farm
What a charming doll
Scrubs toilet bowl for a bowl of rice
How nice
Jan 29, 2015
Jan 29, 2015 at 9:10 AM UTC
They call her names,
send their curses through a screen.
She blocks them,
but the words slip through the cracks,
curl beneath her skin.
She scrubs her face,
but the insults don’t wash away.
She sleeps,
but the whispers slither through her dreams.
Years pass.
The usernames are gone.
The accounts are deleted.
The laughter has moved on.
But the words—
the words still stay.
Mar 30, 2025
Mar 30, 2025 at 7:33 PM UTC
Paramedic 1:
"He's losing so much blood."
Paramedic 2:
"It's a miracle if he can make it past this."
*Saturday night, and I'm in the back of an ambulance,
But not in soul, just in body, oh and in the company of so many wires,
I can't tell where they end and where I begin,
But the paramedics say there was a tragic accident and some flying tires.
We reach the ER, my stretcher is flying on the white tiles,
And soon enough I'm greeted by more wires than I can count,
They're saying that they want to hear my heart,
So I'm opened up past layers of tissues and my heartbeat is playing aloud.
I'm somewhere in a circus, learning how to walk on a tightrope,
One arm on the verge of life, the other on the verge on death,
And my feet are stronger than they've ever been,
I'm not afraid of the fall, I'm afraid they'll see the mark I've had since birth.
And they do, I see it in the face of those people wearing white scrubs,
Their faces become the color of their operating room attire,
They don't know what to do with me,
As they come to realize what's got me here is not the flying tires.
They see my heart, a land that is home to no one,
Yet a massacre is taking place between the northerns and the southerns,
A border holding together the mismatched territories,
But there is no compromising between two armies this stubborn.
Each side wanting to flood the other, wanting to conquer,
And the small canal that was once an uncharted place of peace,
Is now holding a rowing contest to the mind of the victim - me -
Who will reach it first and incorporate their power with claws and teeth...?
It was the time to surrender, ending all attempts at making amends,
And watch cannibals sailing in rivers of blood,
They think each accelerated beat is a new victory,
Yet it was a far away cry from it, it was a new tear, a new cut.
And when each side invades the other, they claim it as their own,
But they are only emigrants thinking they can reconstruct a desert,
It was only a land of chaos, they themselves have caused,
Where was once life flowing in veins, is now where resources are tethered.
And with no winner, the end approached,
The curtains already sweeping the ground,
Doctors wiping sweat from their foreheads,
Letting the hospital gown cover the battleground.*
Paramedic 2:
"Maybe there's a wife we can call, to you know ... deliver the news..."
Paramedic 1:
"It appears, he just went out for a drive in the middle of the night, with no phone or ID... not even his driver's license..."
Paramedic 2:
"Maybe it wasn't even his car..."
THE END
May 22, 2016
May 22, 2016 at 11:27 AM UTC
I saw yonder—
leaves the colour of rusted coins
flattened into the soil,
their veins crumbling at a touch.
Coffee-stained envelopes lay scattered,
their paper-thin as skin,
ink bled blue by rain,
a Paris stamp whispering 1928
from a corner eaten by time.
They kept company with a bruised brown apple,
bitten once, abandoned,
its sweetness turned to rot
in the chill of a narrow room
in the mammoth province of Brandenburg, Prussia.
The rickety Tudor house groaned—
timbers bowing like old men,
windows clouded with breath
that had not been drawn in years.
The past lingered here,
a pale thing pacing the halls,
knocking without fists,
begging to be loosed.
Cobwebs clung to my wrists,
dust rising like breath
as I pried open the forgotten mail—
letters folded and refolded,
addresses crossed out,
sentences that never found their mouths.
“Let’s ride the rails,” he said.
His voice—young, low, certain—
rang through me
like iron striking iron.
My knees softened.
The floor tilted.
“We should get going.”
Two women in white scrubs
smelled of soap and starch,
their hands firm, practiced, final.
Step by step,
I was lifted onto wheels
that hummed and rattled,
carrying me through corridors of echo
toward a place newly named,
a place I would never call home.
The economy collapsed like wet paper.
The war broke what remained.
Yet memory stayed—
warm as breath inside the chest,
refusing burial,
refusing silence.
It never died.
Sep 29, 2018
Sep 29, 2018 at 5:43 PM UTC
Oh hail toothbrush, haven’t seen you since last night
I’ve returned again to cleanse an overbite
Spread the paste thick and minty across your bristled skin
Over the lips and on the culprits, 007 of oral hygiene going in
**** it feels good-
Morning scrubs do away with yesterday’s store appetizer samples
Clinging and eroding the ceramic protection of my enamels
Its poor thin concealing of my porcelain I must protect
Just a little more push and pull- haven’t even eaten breakfast yet
Foaming at the mouth, rabid plague of plaque I’m getting rid of
What extra harm for today’s meals I should have considered
But it’s alright-
My dentist smiles and offers a primary root canal adjustment
But the filling he’s drilling in won’t do too much for my budget
One hand to my jaw could cause my little car to swerve
Unbearable agony from the glass casing encasing that vital nerve
One hole’s enough for today-
Make it home, disgusted jaw line of cotton by the mirror
Spit soaked clouds are temporary relief for bearer
Grab the blender, toss it up, eggs and bacon with my juice
It’s no use- my straw’s stuck with gunk and nothing’s coming loose.
But what about this canker sore?
© 2008
Apr 9, 2015
Apr 9, 2015 at 10:20 AM UTC
I met a poor girl from the slums of manila
She was sweeter than a cone of ice cream her skin prettier than chocolate her kiss pure vanilla
Of her now I dream alone
She could make my heart sing a love verse
Prettier than the new miss universe
She has a young daughter
Some one else all ready got her
Why did he run away?
She lives ten thousand miles away
If only I had met her yesterday
Now I'm bummed I want that poor girl from the slums
She never ask for anything or can afford to pay no bills
Never heard of Beverly hills
Scrubs toilets for food in tattered old dress
Still I'd love to undress and caress
The poor girl from the slums...
D. Clare
Feb 1, 2015
Feb 1, 2015 at 6:07 AM UTC
Riding down the road with thoughts of you and our last conversation you said you wanted to kiss me and trail those kisses down and ...eat.. what to eat for lunch better yet what am I gonna cook for supper maybe hamburgers but I got to pick up ...buns..wow look at those totally squeezable ones on that guy in his medical scrubs you can be my...doctor anytime ...oh man speaking of doctors I got my first mammogram appointment ever and not looking forward to being squeezed and compressed... ya know my truck is riding kinda funny wonder if my tire is deflated may need to stop and get it checked out... hello that guy is totally checking me out isn't he? and that is a no he is checking out my... truck...oh did I ever stop and get the air checked??and this goes on and on
May 7, 2013
May 7, 2013 at 2:34 PM UTC
Drip, Drop, Drip Drop,
The bucket sloshes,
The old woman kneels
To clean the threshold
of the ones she serves
Drip, Drop, Drip, Drop,
The bucket sloshes
She thinks on her past
And her life and her hopes
her dreams, her last
husband long gone
her friends who’ve been near
her enemies who’ve hurt her,
those she holds dear
Drip, Drop, Drip, Drop
The bucket sloshes,
She washes away
She sets herself to work
and begins to pray
Drip, Drop, Drip, Drop
The bucket sloshes,
As she moves down the hall
Her heart, it labors,
as she scrubs at the floor
the billows of her breath
begin to bore
into her hands
she can work no more
she needs a small break
to labor without work
Drip, Drop, Drip, Drop
She weeps for those who have not drawn near,
For those who are hurting, and lonely, and fear
She will stay forever, in her master’s doorway,
She would rather die, than never have stayed
Drip, Drop, Drip, Drop,
The bucket sloshes,
her made clean heart aches,
is comforted by
a sovereign king’s ways
trials and terrors and toil and sin
good he has planned,
don’t let uncertainty win
Drip, Drop, Drip, Drop,
The bucket sloshes,
She goes back to work
To labor and love,
The last to the first
Aug 20, 2010
Aug 20, 2010 at 2:26 PM UTC
And only when every prison
in the police state has
an art gallery
only when hip hop
sounds like a revolutionary
sermon
only when Congress disbands
itself for lack of moral conduct
only when condoms
are jammed tightly
into high school backpacks
only when free speech
isn’t subject to search
and seizure
only when housing projects
get gated fences
only when college
athletes use pi
to find the circumference
of a basketball in their spare time
only when food pantries
exist in old NRA hangouts
only when Monsanto scrubs clean
every black cloud
only when Noah comes back
and transports
two of everything to
a protest movement
only when a protest
movement morphs
into a diversity celebration
and only when the U.S. government
writes a 5,000,000 page
apology for every ****
****** and Bill O’Reilly
sentence uttered
will I even consider having
a picnic.
Oct 24, 2013
Oct 24, 2013 at 11:21 AM UTC
Life flows through the doors,
Dispersed by the ceiling fan,
A makeover for every patron,
The waitress serves a second chance.
Ex-husband but current parent,
Negotiating with a teenage daughter,
Two untouched lunch plates,
As the gap grows further and further.
Central focus being on a book cover,
Held by an E.R nurse still in her scrubs,
The waitress tries to decipher a meaning,
All while wiping leftovers from table tops.
The calender on the wall says Friday,
And in walks a sundress along with a button down,
Two steaks and a red rose,
Right up comes the waitress with a dinner to astound.
Beginnings and ends in motion,
The clock cues for the 40-something man,
In the far corner he sips his black coffee,
Forlorn eyes of a widow staring at a wedding band.
Wiping beads of sweat from her forehead,
Retying her hair into a secured knot,
Exhaustion slowly kicking in,
As she refills the coffee ***
The college girl strolling in with her book bag,
Smiles with pity at her as she gives her order,
She thinks of how her minimum wage must look,
But her love for her job makes her smile never falter.
Days are something treasured,
Every hour, a different movie plays,
She collects all those stories,
With the tip left after the customer pays.
Apr 8, 2016
Apr 8, 2016 at 4:54 PM UTC
From my new book, Poems of Ancient Rome and Greece, available in paperback on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as eBook on Kindle, Nook, and Apple Books: https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Ancient-Greece-Christopher-Saitta/dp/B0DS6933HB?ref_=ast_author_dp
My mother the sea,
She woke my sandy eyes,
Just to tell me she had to leave,
Draw past the markets where the fish are sun-dried,
Snarled by the coral-rough hands of divers deep.
My mother the sea,
She left her running tab
Of the grocer’s choicest greens,
Thumbed the velamentous rinds and spiny scarola,
Her xylem and phloem are the slow moving cruciferousness of a breeze.
My mother the sea,
Charwoman of tides,
Who dips and delves upon her knees,
Who scrubs her brothel-coves with chamber lye,
Cyprian mistress of the salt-stained sheets.
I have looked for you, mother,
A scugnizzo amid the striped awnings of the marketplace
~ like sails to the sky ~
Where the fishmongers hawk their pride
Of conch, cavallo, and black sea bream.
I have looked for you, mother,
Walked sun-forged along the boardwalk,
Amid the neon-mascara of signs,
Hand-in-hand with only the ladyfingers of salt and vinegar fries,
Toward the crisp syllabub of pebbles and sand.
A beach is window-warmth spread free, cosmopolitan,
The longeur of eyes crushed in the glass-dust of cities.
And in the sputtering of the frosted spume of tides,
Held broken seashells in my hands like broken needles,
Heard the pump-click of the ventilator through your mask of sand.
My mother the sea,
A naked convalescent,
Whose ever-turnings have taken
A turn for the worse.
Who will know her by her death, who but me?
Jan 21, 2025
Jan 21, 2025 at 8:29 AM UTC
turns out I’m not as funny as I thought I was
also, turns out people who you talk to online are real people.
what
that’s weird
and nice
today I watched Scrubs for the first time
the main character is kind of cute
I do not like his friends ****** hair
today I watched the sunset in a field for the second night in a row
I decided I want to do this every single day
and I want people to come with me
but nobody wants to and I’m kind of sad about it
my friend is asleep and I’m not
if she were not here I would probably be crying about music
thx
when people ask what I write I have no idea what to tell them
because mostly people wouldn’t consider this poetry and I wouldn’t either
I just like writing small thoughts I think
I don’t know
I’m confused as ****
I’m nervous a lot of the time
I cannot keep eye contact with people because I am nervous at those times
that’s okay probably
she just made a noise that sounded happy while sleeping
Aug 12, 2014
Aug 12, 2014 at 6:01 AM UTC
I lived a childhood of dirt:
my beginning and end, my friend, my
frontier. Dirt was the reason why
when other kids were always sick, my antibodies
made me a demigoddess, a mud-pie,
sand-cookie, dirt gourmet
crunching lightly-rinsed carrots wiggled
straight from the ground.
It never hurt, never hurt at all.
Warm dirt under my knees and hands,
my nails blackened, feet buried like I
could root myself in the soil -- I was lettuce
with dirt at the center of each lacy skirt.
Horseradish, deep in the ground and bitter,
wanting to become something sweeter, a new
tree or rosebush or better yet a veggie,
like the wild dirt-skinned potatoes
I dug up in the yard.
But tubers don’t have moms who give
***** looks and shake their heads,
examine your hair and your nails.
She sighs at the dark stain of your
feet, and banishes you
to a white tub, where she scrubs
the back of your neck, muttering
“Dirt, dirt, dirt,” as if
she doesn’t know what you are made of.
So give me the dirt, because I know my onions.
Always digging for gossip, flipping up
the neighborhood skirt, curious whispers
the way cornstalks share their childhood
tales before being tilled down,
becoming rich, dark dirt.
Ashes to ashes, I recognize some
for what they are, just fertilizer
for the imaginations and vibrations of others.
I may be half dirt but don’t
treat me like it, full of grit and
covered in sand from my hands to
my elbows. But what I am won’t
put up with your ******** Dirt is
a mother, to feed and flourish, dirt
is a woman much like me, and you
will never know the dirt under my
fingernails the same way I do.
May 24, 2013
May 24, 2013 at 1:57 AM UTC
She plunges into the hot water
and begins to scrub. Brush and
soap on skin. She wants him off
and out of her. Undo him from her.
Unkiss his kisses, untouch his touches.
She breathes in. She reeks, stinks
of him. He seems to have penetrated
every orifice on her body. She pushes
herself under the water, holds herself
there, opens her eyes even the sting
brings no purification. She sits up and
holds the sides of the bath. Calm down
she tells her shaking hands and legs
but they disobey and carry on like
disobedient children in play. She tries
to think of other things. Think of
somewhere nice, some time once
enjoyed, some pleasure once had,
sipping of the best wine, greedy
eating of caviar or grape. But no.
Everything is focused on him and
the **** She rubs and scrubs until
she’s red and raw. Stop stop her
inner voice screams. Nothing is
what it seems. He pushes his way
even into her every thought now.
He seeps into every pore. The water
fails to clean. She sits there naked,
undone, brush in hand, hair in a mess.
This is not real she says, but knows
it is, she in the bath, wet, raw, sore
and sullied. Yes that’s a word mother
would have used: sullied. Tainted,
tarnished, degraded or as Mother
would have said: dishonoured. She
focuses on each aspect of her flesh
as if seen for the first time. What
you focus on is your reality. Who said
that? Does it matter now? Dostoevsky?
The Idiot, that book. Who cares who
said what. The water is no longer hot.
He is still on skin and in orifice in spite
of the rubs and scrubs and tears and curses.
No longer the innocent, no more the
sipping of wine or eating of grape.
Just him and memory of the ****
Jul 6, 2012
Jul 6, 2012 at 1:52 AM UTC
Prozac and Tic Tacs
That's what keeps me sane
One keeps my mouth clean
The other Scrubs my brain
These small sweet little pills I pop
One
now two
now four
I wonder what would happen if I took a couple more
Jul 24, 2015
Jul 24, 2015 at 5:26 PM UTC
The flowers fragrance was crushed by the heavy iron of a man’s error
He hugs their two little buds, distraught to be the bearer
To tell them the story of how Mother Nature will now get to share her.
Her garden, so beautiful and full, slowly weeps a storm so silent and violent it’s unsure if it’s own survival
The forest, the trees, the scrubs, all shake their heads in denial.
His wings torn almost broken
Forever frozen in the hell of heartbreak
Endless days, endless nights
Where their breathing alone shatters into sharp splinters leaving tears and anger to cure the road to recovery
It is said that time provide the space for us all to mend our wings, the grace and forgiveness to smile and laugh
To see joy in her smile on their faces, the warmth of their hugs and the kindness we all know was her .
Feb 7, 2021
Feb 7, 2021 at 9:55 AM UTC