Deliverance Poem by Herbert Nehrlich

The nurse had left him
to his thoughts and the IV
of 'doing something' fluid,
and still, his undiminished pain
that dreadful night,
when he could hear cajoling
on the street below,
of happy youth in action.

The morphine gadget,
self-injecting, timed,
he'd labelled it
'Deliverance',
had given up
in silence
and perhaps disgust
at its futility.

And no replacement
was to be available,
due to the weekend.

That tiny spec
inside his gut
had grown
to now
unmanageable,
and, most certainly
unreasonable
size,
you know
proliferation,
a thirteen letter word.

It would not bow
to but the biggest
cannons.

For hours,
whose minutes
seemed to
in rash convenience
(act of hostility?)
have frozen
in time,
he lay there,
willing ghosts away.

Yet, they would not
as they did not possess
a human face
to smile with.

'At last'!
How true, he thought,
this pun,
he took the
object of
malfeasance,
and bit the daylights
out of it,
with healthy molars
and the still considerable,
and unaffected power of
the masseter.
Strongest muscle
in his body
though useless
in this battle
of his shame.

It worked at once,
and many grains
of noble cousins
of the precious poppy
flowed into him.
Delivering Deliverance.