And here's the doctor.
It's this poem called "Tongue Doctor."
"I am one-minute years old.
People say I'm killing myself falling into my shadow,
but they can't see the uprising part.
They think I'm being opaque when I wear sunglasses in the rain.
So I practically had to shout, "I'm from Cal!
La!
Forn!
Ya!"
Haven't always been, once was from a small Pennsylvanian town
famous for mummification, where they treated the brain
in ways icky and obscure.
As you would guess, it's difficult
maintaining homeostasis.
Mist escapes my mouth, a geyser from the weak seal in my head.
Ever jump out of bed and realize your head is still
on the pillow?
We're all driven forward by explosion after all.
I tell you this so you can prepare yourself for my desire.
I want to be your tongue doctor.
First, I will land learn the polysyllabic Latinate term
so my job can be immediately impressive for being
un-understandable.
I'll be in constant legal wrangles,
but you keep coming because, for tongue, there's
really no one else.
In my waiting room, you're calmed
by lute arrangements of James Brown,
then led down a moss-textured hall
and ask to remove your pants, sit on tissue paper.
Then I arrive in my red lab coat like a peony blooming
on fast forward and put my no-harm-causing Hippocratic
hand upon your breast I mean shoulder, and say,
"Let's see that tongue."
On your tongue I see your car has broken down.
I see the clawing at work on your frenulum, the spiral
of betrayals that has been your lovelife
in the fungiforme papillae, the falls from the teetertot
instigated by bacillus-ridden homunculi bent
on your destruction.
I can see your dead mother glaring
from her gurney like a stabbed hawk
in the glossopalatine arch.
I see you pressing your face against the horse's neck
and weeping, weeping into an emptying tub.
I see you lost in tall trees, the green roots of your hope,
your being feathering out at the tips
to join the feathery tips of other beings
like the tops of tied-together carrots.
I can see your bravery changing the pH.
I can see your beauty like sparks
from bashed-together rocks.
I can see your beauty like grass on fire.
I can see how you've bitten your tongue, my darling,
trying to keep your secrets."