Thingness
Image source: Unsplash
by Dr. Lloyd Jacobs
I have never felt my thingness more forcefully
than on that day my pacemaker battery was changed after
ten years dependence on its wires and connectors, set
opposite God’s three score ten, as beneath a Diocletian sword.
And the room where the change was carried out was a cavern
of x-ray and digital readout tubes; the walls and the ceiling
were festooned with murmuring cylinders and cubes
perched atop stalagmites or suspended from stalactites
I was a cog, a moving part in a buzzing beeping machine.
The dwellers in this cave were competent and automatic, they
crossed and re-crossed with unconcern the porous boundary
between kindness and condescension.
Dr. Lloyd Jacobs is President Emeritus of The University of Toledo. He has published 3 collections of poetry and was previously a professor of vascular surgery at the University of Michigan
