Doctor

One day, I'll tell my daughter
I wanted to be a poet so
I became a doctor
broke the bindings of my textbooks 
even as my bones groaned under
the memory of inscisors and hitting,
they buckled through every exam
        buckled me down to the reality of healing, that is
the itching crawl of tissue and personality knitting themselves back
into something whole

I'll tell my daughter, Baby,
you don't need to cut yourself open 
just to describe red
You don't owe the audience a sacrifice
     break the bread of your flesh
make loaves out of your wrists
misting the air in their eagerness to be swallowed
Sometimes, making it looks like me
     unscarred,
           apparently 
eyes leaking with light and chemistry 
atoms fusing to give me energy to make it
another night more

You don't need to suffer to take suffering away
though doctors do suffer plenty
It takes maniacal love for reanimation
for shadow puppetry, surgical knives
sparring with shadows
to make them finger-bunnies
to become messiah
to break the bread and eat it too
to live every death on your operating table
and love every life that left it

Poets linger in condemned stories
still smoking slightly around the bones of each window
They peer into the haunted cavity 
hunting for a spark, even in dead cities
Doctors give stories a say in their demise
and an ear to hear it home
they were poets once, after all
they wrote about you, long ago
As a doctor, you live more than one life
as a poet, you make lives live forever
and any girl who lost life but loves stories still
should look into a career

I wanted to be a doctor, I'll tell my daughter
so I became a poet
died first and lived later
but later crept up on me sooner than sleep
so I started studying and wrote a miracle
I mean, I wrote a paper and became a miracle
I was healing and in doing so
​becoming the enabler of this nasty habit
of staying alive
of wanting people
of choosing today
now
now
now
now
every now that will come after now
I'll tell her

medicine made me and
poetry gave me
a daughter to tell this to