Thingness
Image source: Unsplash
by Dr. Lloyd Jacobs
I have never felt my thingness more forcefully felt more like a thing
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
