Skid

I See a Lily on Thy Brow

I See a Lily on Thy Brow It is 1816 and you gash your hand unloading a crate of geese, but if you keep working you’ll be able to buy a bucket of beer with your potatoes. You’re probably 14 although no one knows for sure and the whore you sometimes sleep with could be your younger sister and when your hand throbs to twice its size turning the fingernails green, she knots a poultice of mustard and turkey grease but the next morning, you wake to a yellow world and stumble through the London streets until your head implodes like a suffocated fire stuffing your nose with rancid smoke. Somehow you’re removed to Guy’s Infirmary. It’s Tuesday. The surgeon will demonstrate on Wednesday and you’re the demonstration. Five guzzles of brandy then they hoist you into the theater, into the trapped drone and humid scuffle, the throng of students a single body staked with a thousand peering bulbs and the doctor begins to saw. Of course you’ll die in a week, suppurating on a camphorsoaked sheet but now you scream and scream, plash in a red river, in sulfuric steam 66 but above you, the assistant holding you down, trying to fix you with sad, electric eyes is John Keats. 67 ...