Only three days and already I loathe this place, <br />this milk-white morgue, this smiling slaughterhouse, <br />where girls in straitjackets grow fat on pills, <br />floating on pale clouds of Clozapine, <br />sad white angels with their wings lopped off, <br />their eyes blind as stones rattling in a gris gris bag. <br /> <br />I’ve had it with these nurses, with their dull <br />white smocks and their hypodermic needles, <br />the smiling orderlies with black holes for eyes, <br />their veins pumped fat with steroids, <br />psychiatrists with the same filthy grins, <br />talking through their pink Pepto-Bismol mouths. <br /> <br />Do they know that with one pinch of cayenne <br />I could turn their liver into a hornet’s nest, <br />make roaches scurry through their black veins? <br />That with one single strand of horse’s hair <br />I could squeeze the breath from their fat pink necks, <br />stop the clock from ticking in their chest? <br /> <br />Do they see me in the cold dull afternoon <br />sewing bloodroot into dolls, drawing X’s in the air? <br />Do they know that while I stand in line for meds <br />I'm working a mean batch of spells in my head? <br />That at night I keep a crow’s foot in my pocket, <br />hidden like a white pill under my tongue?<br /><br />Chris Tusa<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-retired-voodoo-priestess-dreams-of-revenge-fro/
