The burn

A meniscus sucks the 100ml mark
in a beaker of just-boiled water.
The sleeves of my sloppy joe are
stretched, flop like old breasts.
There are two distinct moments:
shock and pain. The body’s strange fashion,
a delay, then the brain’s alarm.
What you want is the pain,
the nice ambulance men applying
a tea-tree poultice, praising you
for running the cold tap and sousing
that angry welt. Bundling you up
and off to hospital; dosing you
with tranquilisers. What you don’t want
is a wire stuck along the way,
an ectopic pregnancy of the mind,
a white missive trapped in your liver.
You don’t want the baby crying
while that signal halts at your dorsal horn
and tarries at your thalamus. You want it
to hit your limbic system well before then.
You want spasm like an infant wants milk.
You want that tension out in your person.
You must shudder with a newborn’s cry.

(First published in Avatar Review, Issue 18, June 2016.)