Neurological Necropolis

By Lily Brennan

Here Lies The Failed Operations
The graveyard—
Row on row, inside us—
We are aneurysm,*
We are pineocytoma,*
We are glioma,*
We are the surgeons’ dead.
Their lab coats graze our namesakes
Forged by wayward scalpels.
They scour their neurological necropolis—
The silent punishment of half-baked gods.
We the dead, who slip our sentence by a not so fatal mistake,
Roam the catacombs as ghouls and sudden apparitions
Throwing our marks of perpetual failure at their subconscious—
A sagging face,
A paralyzed body,
A phantom twitch from a mind lost in a coma.
Startled by our onslaught of postmortem dilapidation
The surgeon awakens.
In three-four time they perform their daily dance between life and death
Their sterile theatre, familiar to all by the scent of bleach-covered unknowns
and the endless white, white, white
“Time of death…”