No Recourse

It's my last day on earth and a guy in a white coat I hope to Christ is really a doctor and not some paranoid asshole escapee from a nuthouse is asking me intimate weird questions about my medical history, writing the answers down on a clipboard with a crude holographic likeness of a winking Mona Lisa who looks I think like Kirk Douglas in drag taped to the back. Because my tenure here is tenuous, I don't respond to his steady stream of insultsthough I am sorely, as they say, tempted to-as he mocks the scars, sags and creases of a body I've always hated. "Ugly black mark, right thigh," he demands, pointing with his pen. Grudging but obedient, I answer: "Pencil stab, kid brother, 1951." "Why?" "Teased him." "About what?" I feel a mixed rush of anger and shame. "Being a sissy." He scowls, and I wish I could shove the pen up his ass, but I need to give in. "Jagged scar, left eyebrow," he says, fingering the hair, and in spite of myself I get an odd tingle. "Highschool gangfight," I answer, remembering the sneer on the face of the kid who started it by calling me a queer. He pauses, staring deep into tmy eyes, then goes on about the folds of belly-fat, the misshapen navel, the lopsided ears, the crooked chin, and I'm left feeling less like a man than ever and more his minion-the word comes to me out of a blue very like his eyes-so when he smirks at the patch of psoriasis I've always been ashamed of, it's more than I can bear. "Singed by the high-tension wires of life," I lisp, limp-wristed, and stare into those depthless captivating eyes, which suddenly gleam with lust. Swiftly licking his lips, he yanks off a rubber mask: it's our twelfth-grade English teacher, Dr. Sonnenfeld, we all thought was having an affair with the custodian Mr. Delp, and here he is at heaven's gate with my fate in his hand which is now behind my back and me without a single hymn to sing

WILLIAM KULIK'S most recent book is The Voice of Robert Desnos: Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005). These prose poems are from an as yet unpublished collection titled Nowhere Fast: Fifty-Six Poems in Prose.

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