Feb 07
Still-frame
I thought he was sleeping -
‘Til we rolled him over.
The hole in his head.
Grey, curdled lumps on his shirt.
Maybe vomit.
Maybe brain.
His leg torn to nothing.
Obliterated.
Gone.
We wrapped the stump in wet dressings.
To stop the absent bleeding?
To protect from infection, though we all know they’ll cut it off anyway.
It seems…”right”.
And doing nothing feels like we’re failing him.
February 7th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
The simple, almost desperate, human feeling that you should do something - regardless of how pointless of pathetic.
Sympathies.
February 7th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
oww, lots of hurt in this
February 7th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
I don’t know how you have the endless courage to keep doing your job. Poor bloke.
February 7th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
there’s dignity in doing ’something’…
February 8th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Someone needs to do it. To do something ‘right’. Someone needs to be the one to help. The one to hurt, so others don’t. To watch the pain of others, and cushion humanity from it. Thanks.
February 9th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Kal
I think it is something to do with the human condition. To hope when all hope appears lost, and do something however it may be seen, in order to bring succour and comfort to a fellow human being.
Once again, a very poignent post told well.
Thank you
February 10th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Glad you were there to do something, anything, for him
February 12th, 2010 at 10:09 am
a man who had fallen among thieves (e e cummings)
a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat
fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin
whereon a dozen staunch and Meal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because
swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise
one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert.
Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars
April 13th, 2010 at 8:33 am
[…] I come home from a shift and have images in my head that I need to expunge and file away somewhere else. When I’ve witnessed violence, depravity […]