Guinea Pig Gospel
(Tuskegee, Alabama)
Out of mildewed files, out of charts
burnt by the blind god of Indifference and Mistakes,
out of a tainted petri dish and a drawer
strewn with syringes, I rise tonight
and sail on my paper robe
to where the stethoscope’s cold drum
hovers over the taut chests of the sleepers.
Honorable Members of the Committee
of Ends and Means, take note of me now.
Once upon a time I was young and poor.
I laughed. I dreamed. I danced.
I slept naked in a field listening to bullfrogs
bark in the distance, while my blood
coursed the length of my fingerbones
and pounded against my skull, my neck, my heart
like a thousand gilded hammers.
What foolishness, you think.
What dogs did I wallow with, you wonder.
It is true. We are all only human,
and I have paid the price of a multitude,
of my race, of the sick and exploited, of my children
born in the gray muck of my illness
and buried beneath the blighted oak behind the smokehouse.
Ladies and Gentlemen, here is Exhibit X,
my body the bacteria infiltrated,
little flotillas colonizing flesh and blood.
Here are the smoldering chancres, the rashes
that rose then flared out like cities,
sprawling into the suburbs the doctors returned to each evening.
They slept in clean beds and their silence
filled windows and closets, bathtubs and sinks,
spread over swept lawns and spilled into the sterilized streets,
drifted up through pines to the stars
that glistened like sugar pills, to the moon
lacquered with the sweat of my fever,
its icy beam smoking on roofs that could be anywhere.
Here is the cure locked away in a cabinet
without a key, marked with a label
I could not read, a warm square of sunlight
that never touched my forehead.
Here are the guinea pigs that ate and got fat
and rolled in cedar chips, left to their fate,
and the delirious swine I carried with me
to death, thrashing against the walls of my body,
the fortified hold of a ship.
And here is my spine, a broken ladder of light
on the floor of the sea that swells
and rages in each of us,
our passage not over, but just begun.
