Meaningless.
Six feet away
From a squirming man
Trapped strapped to a
Merciless unyielding chair
Wheeled in by an exasperated
Nearly-broke-her-finger nurse.
Acrobat, WWII vet, graphic designer,
Eclectic checkered existence,
Combative once again.
Restrained, unrestrained cutting tongue
Spitting out godammits and OK shits
In an escape-frustrated
Machine-gun garbled-sound frenzy.
Impotently fingerpicking at
Harshly tied bondage blue seatbelt.
No socks, numb to foot warmth
Meds-laced applesauce
Stained grey sweater
Black three-green-side-stripe sweatpants
Raw sweat and shit stink rising from the groin.
An incrementally dying old man
A cooling spent commerce empire
Of American dreams ruined by
Age and delirium and
Genetic dementia predisposition.
Constant agitated seat repositioning.
Mutter mumble, gripe and grumble
Wriggle and writhe
Fractured plot and fake escape.
"Don't pull your pants down Harold!
Leave them up! You're strapped to that chair!
You can't get up!"
"I know, but I can't avoid it!"
"Yes you can, just leave your pants up!"
Constant picking, fidgeting, frowning, testing,
Shaping up, pulling up, cooling...down.
Broken awake dreaming head
Consumed by feverish jail escape anthems
Deranged nonexistent filing
And boxing and working
Puritan work ethic
Slowly sun-setting
In the
Brittle breaking-down bones
Twilight of a graphically designed
United States middle class fiefdom.
Followed all the rules
Played it straight and hard and cool
But still stunningly ended up
An unmendable melting skinstorm
Of harsh reverse-evolutionary twitches of
Catheter-pulling quiet-hope removal
And all America's horses
And all America's men
Couldn't put Harold
Together
Again.
END
(Old one I rescued from the dustbin of instantly-gone Facebook history. About an old man I worked with in Chicago.)
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