National Geographic

The sinew with which I am bound is what remains after some cruel operation, dissection without the honest curiosity of science.  These were experiments once.  They have become obsessions.  Repeated.  Again.  Repeated until the tests turn into choreography.  The outcomes--obvious--are immune to any change.

The biologist, is somewhere washing his lab coat; his lover is off soiling his own.  It has always struck me both strange and ridiculous that these garments are bleached to such a blasphemous shade of purity. My ex had a secret hamper that he kept all those years full of remnants retained from the red-dirt days of those summers.

One of them said, "These cotton fields were blighted from the start."  The boll weevils knew it years ago and thought nothing of the tobacco they spat about, the trail of slime, the history of piss.  The stains will bleed too easily into the dampness of the fabric, the warp and the wet.  A souvenir, the humidity lingered and left the moldering laundry heavy with opinion.  Everything, in time, soaks in.  Speculation is the enemy of science.

Lab coats, aprons, the face masks that I have asked them each to remove...  I have wondered, is this white that is brighter than white designed to expose the hubris of their medicine?  The rivulets of blood become something else.  The sin of pride has mapped a hapless calligraphy on bleached white chest.  Moreover, the gloves--they love the mystery of organs--are only satisfied when deep enough in entrails to predict the future.

And the bodies burned by equatorial desires are figures far more haunting that the ghosts.  Darkness of soul and darkness of mind, all of this disappears in jungles, in deep forests consumed by night.  Bodies are assumed into a mystery that might be heaven, a heaven long confused with hell.  These loins are now embroiled in a politic that is now shaded by a fascination that is blind, by history, by something under history that justifies lust.