Ode to Bandages

Your white fibre, tightly wound

In gauzy embrace

Protector of my hallowed manifolds

On a seditious plane

Aflame with poison and pathogen

Coarse as shamans’ hands, you

Baptise in the sterile fire of alcohol

You deflect, devour

The perpetual assail of life and

Death

Austere and pure

You

Trace my form

With silken fingers sketching

A veil, avail

Me

With your secret service

Ruthlessly efficient

Fortress of vitality—the vanguard

Reaper of the ambitious

Antiviral; annihilator

National defender, à la

Kratos, the divine enforcer

Memento mori, mortal fear

Excised by the fibres of your being

Eternal protector atop gleaming rivulets of blood

Cleanse malignance, decay, and silt, by

Holy trinity,

United filaments defy putrefaction, a

Ménage a trois: flesh, fibre, fluid

Coalesce with me, your skin on mine

Luxuriant, of body and mind

Ablated of stifling rust

Irrigated, flushed, purged of rot

Restored to Adonic youth, I

Blossom

Anodyne, analgesic allays my affliction

Mending the heart raucously inflamed

Defiled and torn by the

Vicious vicissitudes of being

Oh would that it were so

That life begot life

Instead of deadly hatred and glistening spite

And savage contempt, and frothing rage

And psychopathic, addictive, malefic delight

But as that happens to be

That the noxious eternally plagues me

O Bandage

I shall forever need thee.