Last Orders

[71degrees]

Bare tapping toes
curled and eager for dance
spring me from the picnic table
across the warm shadow-slatted
beer-garden cobblestones
through rambunctiousness
to the back-bar hatch
where Adam or Ben provide
another blood-brown ale;
tart effervescent
liquid presence.

Tautened hamstrings
numbed by a bucket-seat
haul concrete feet
past walls of warnings
into the windowless office
where someone stranger MD
closes a yellowish folder
pockets a pen
and pronounces the diagnosis;
cirrhosis of the liver,
I blink then shiver.

Lead-lined lids shut
on senses dulled by a draft
seeping through my shoulder
inducing staged sleep in a room
of clicks, pumps, beeps
and blinding light
where twelve incise and reveal
to harvest a saviour
and sow then stitch
their presence within me;
amnesty granted,
humanity transplanted

Liver transplant? Maybe I'm taking this too literally. Almost sounds like the narrator is moving from tavern floor to operating room floor. And doing it quite visually I may add. Wouldn't mind seeing a bit more at the beginning to let us in as to the extent of damage...basically we get one word: cirrhosis, but that doesn't come until the second stanza. To someone who's been there, maybe that's enough damage. It's okay if I don't know who Adam and Ben are but it might help set the table, so to speak, if we are introduced more to who they are...anything to flush out the first stanza and let me who what's afoot.

All the language is in place: (e.g. tautened, numbed, windowless, etc. all the way to amnesty (a great word choice here)). "Humanity" is an interesting word to use, but assuming the transplant theme is correct, maybe it's the right choice. I like it, I'm just thinking about it...to me that's a good poem when it makes me think. Methinks there is much more of the human condition to this episode. Would like to see more of it.