All the Sad Doctors

With black bags stuffed below their eyes, all the sad doctors come to me now like mourners in the time of plague. Crying in their office bathrooms, carrying boxes of charts home at night, they are too tired to eat, and sex excites them less than a committee meeting. Without dreams, their eyes watch the clock tick off the wounded hours-thousands of doctors writhing on the scarred suture line of American medicine like a cargo of used syringes washed up with drowned birds on an oil-soaked beach.