Cosmetic Surgery

Disfigured.Imperfect.

Intervene in destiny

And change it before it’s too late,

Before you lose everything-

Love and money and success.

Look in the mirror-

Where the voodoo begins.

The cutter has come

To make blood flow,

To correct the damage nature has done.

Does he love or does he hate?

Do his hands heal or attack?


Beauty’s dispute takes the soul for prey.

Bodies are just bits and pieces-

Who owns them,in the end?

A doctored smile in a magazine

Is suddenly discarded, crumpled, in the bin.


All the bumps and scars and anomalies

Of my weird geography

Terrorize my waking dreams.

Between ugliness and splendour

Is a mere fraction.

This body is nothing

But the image of what it might become.

I am an impersonator,

Never off the stage.


More real is the photograph,

The beloved monster

I serve and emulate.

The inescapable spectre.

All those mug shots on the police station wall.

All those movie star pin-ups.


What will emerge

From this face-cocoon?

Another mask.

New life,bruised and swollen.

The scalpel’s kiss

Tells me I am loved.


Laid out again on the operating table,

I wait for the cold hands to manipulate me

And annihilate the unwanted;

The morphine of anguish

Puts me under once more;

Sailing like a pharaoh on his solar barque

Through the underworld,

To meet my birth-star,

I struggle up again,reborn, victorious;

I turn to face the mirror,

And try to interpret

The stranger

Risen like a volcanic island

From chaotic seas.