I snap the blade into the scalpel’s handle
. . . Metal tongue, the violator’s shaft, is familiar to my hand
. . . . . . . . . the long nails of a vamp should suit me better

The brusque soldier,
. . . . . . just hours ago all hands and pinches
. . . settles from screams into ether’s kind arms
His blood chases my blade across his iodine-sick, fur-pocked belly

I am inside now
. . . inside the jungly cleft, the snaky gut
With a genuine smile I reach up to my wrist, grip his bowels
. . . . . . think of rape, how unwanted my penetration is
. . . I am not a doctor
. . . . . . (my Hippocratic oath is closer to hypocrisy)
. . . I am not a man on a plane of men
. . . I should be serving my only real purpose

. . . I have delivered babies too often
. . . . . . from sad WACs and WAVEs in denial
. . . I have cleaned holes crusty with gangrene
. . . . . . bartered cigarettes for bluebottles
. . . Prayed on abscessed flesh with maggot rosaries
I search the viscera for a moment
. . . despise such an empty cavern where womb should be
. . . Mere ducts and spaces
A vessel of death, hands strapped to carbine or torpedo

The musty little bag, the putrid sac of an organ we never need,
. . . exits with a scant graze of my knife
. . . . . . . . . bursts with a pop like Nazi gunfire
. . . . . . splatters onto parachutes and flyboys
. . . . . . . . . like shrapnel into Nipponese faces

I sew up this rent belly
. . . and hope
. . . . . . if plane and firestorm and enemy are willing
. this boy turned man turned killer turned foul body
. . . will die in a foxhole
. . . . . . smeared across tank treads
. . . . . . . . . crushed in the wreckage of a bomber
His devoutest dream, his destiny, his preference

Not in bed

. . . Not
. . . . in the arms of a woman.