johnny

A johnny reveals vulnerability.

It leaves the spinal chord exposed, and allows for the rest of the body to be accessed easily.

It is simple.
It is deceptively light, whimsical.
It lies about the chronology of a trauma.

A johnny makes one a poet, passionate about death and war and all of the ideals that make rotting away a fiction. A johnny asks for the arrival of a floating woman, in the hospital halls, a Presbyterian possibly, with her ancient harp, to play a song, in gratitude, as a volunteer, to the gaping hole the johnny so unabashedly ifantilizes.

The johnny reduces limitations.

It expands the world in the eyes of the recently injured, while at the same time reducing their world, and its uncertainty, to the tying of a knot, behind the neck, intersecting the point at which the spinal chord meets the cerebellum.

The johnny blindly humiliates. It is at once carnivalesque and ignominious.

The old mole mocks the eagle and defecating your pants is no longer a peril. At once a gown and a cape, the johnny is pantless.

It makes the immoral organic.

A state of ghost like grace, where the involuntary expulsion of material, lack of cognizance, severing of a limb, all disappear into the serial world of hospital patients lining up for the same finality, the same burning, the same buzzards eating us whole that Geechie Wiley spoke of in her Last Kind Word Blues.

The johnny is cotton.
It is an open field for the patient.
It is patience on an assembly line.