This Day of Living

My whole world changed overnight,
or perhaps I should say afternoon,
when a warehouse door fell on me
crushing and breaking my lower back,
that “small” area called lumbar,
transverse fracture, medically said,
(so fortunate for me I survived)
yet they shot me full of morphine
to mitigate that awful pain.
Nerve headquarters defines the spine, 
and spasms of flesh like a night
crawler pierced, and every three hours
that hypodermic came to sooth,
yet its effect was fair to poor,
as muscles spasmed like strained knots
pulled by the anger that is trauma.
I can still hear the guillotine
that was the door, five hundred pounds
which sought prey, that airman me as
enlistee, a soldier long ago 
when Vietnam was going strong,
and many others bled and died.
As fortunate, I am still alive
despite the marksman that was weight,
a most defective mass of metal,
wheels on tracks yet one had broken,
condemned, the door, then held on forks
of a tow-lift pressed to service…
(how cold winds blew in winter’s grip;
  the Colonel said to lift the door 
  with forklift though it wasn’t safe,
  and it had been condemned all right.)
So it found me one afternoon,
and three months in the hospital
upon a Stryker Frame (thin board)
tied down, a body-cast later on;
learned to walk again, (well grounded),
residuals, arthritis mostly,
yet the nerves act up in anger,
though I grin this day of living.


40 Lines 
Writer’s Cramp 
3-25-20