Heart Bypass Surgery

DRAGON PATHS Pain is a monstrous person who owns many houses. He is a foreign man, and wilier than I am. When I freeze him out of one abode with needles of novocaine, he moves into another and slants his fierce darts through bone-white windows, drawing my ribs like shutters. This summer, he resides in the manse of my spine, an estate of twenty-four rooms, all wired for light so that he can work at night, setting his land mines and punji sticks deep in my neural jungles. He has captured my best madness and makes war with my hand and my mouth, taking raw meat for his red home of quake and flood and revolutions, whose terms are negotiated in fiery tongues I cannot speak. Trapped in his dragon paths, I try to hide, eyes shut tight, breath short. But he finds me, for he loves me with a hateful love, incendiary in its sticky napalm passion. Serpent warlord, opium-eater and thief of houses, burns the slum we share, hating the hell we live in. In the fallen city of my body, pain lays siege to the walls of my soul, facing me across the gutters of my blood, all that we have in common washing away through the ruins. written by Letha Hunter Bishop, Atlanta, GA (About 7 years ago, when I was working as a dental hygienist, I saw this patient one day who told me about her migraines and told me that she wrote poetry. She mailed me this poem and gave me permission to post it and pass it along. She is a lovely elderly lady, who lives with daily back pain, migraines, post-polio syndrome, and epilepsy, just to name a few burdens, but she has a lovely smile and a positive spirit. She was quite an inspiration to me and I thought I would share her poem about pain. Christy)