Daylight Shavings

His periwinkle Oxford looked a size too big
as though his wife had failed again
or the day's stress had deflated him.
I suspected the latter; a man with so many
framed degrees on his walls would not
settle for anything less than a model example
of bridal perfection. The trophy wives were left
to lawyers since the damned attract the damned.
Doctors, perhaps in freshman physiology, learned
how to clone their mothers for the greater good
of the marriage. Their divorce rate was low.

"Does it bother you?" he asked
not looking up from my chart on his clipboard.

"Not enough to make it worth acting on it."
I felt as though my epidermis was temporarily
transformed to plastic wrap. He didn't need to
glance my way to convince himself that I had
begged for abortions; I had watched families die;
I was a genetic contradiction incapable of being
related to a good patient like my mother; I was neither
what I made myself out to be nor what that chart said.
My foibles were beyond the scope of science.
I could no longer speak in the Royal We.

I heard a nurse yawn through the crack under the doorway.
Wasn't there some law against that?
A thousand ears were listening, or so I thought.
The truth is that I was merely another number--
in this case a less desirable one.
As a doctor and a man of probabilities
he suspected that there were cadavers more worthy
of life than me.

"Good. Then live with it as best you can,"
he said matter-of-factly as he loosened his tie
from around his neck with the hand not
holding the pen. His skin was sallow and waxy.
It looked bloated, like his body had been
decomposing in a river for two days
and then somehow became reanimated.
There I was getting medical advice
from a man beyond the Great Divide.
It seemed like a fitting decision considering
my track record. I sucked in hard
and tasted the infection. The dead were all around
me in that supposedly sterile room.

"Thanks, Doc. I hope to not see you soon."

He didn't laugh. Even if he'd never heard the joke
he would not've stooped to that.
A faint smirk shot across his taut face.
It wasn't because of my attempt at humor;
it was the fact that he got paid for this.
My curse was that I knew the difference.

Sundowning, baby.
They call this sundowning.