Poems on the Job

There's nothing better than getting paid to read poems. Or to write blogs that include the reading and disseminating of poems. I mean, maybe the school doesn't realize it's paying me to do these things (I'm currently "working" at the hospital as a weekend radiology technician. My title today shall be henceforth: O Glorious Taker of Radiographs, O Illuminator of Fractures, Her Holiness of the X-Ray. Hmm...Now where can I find a nametag around here?), but I think it should be proud to witness the versatility of its students, who are not all nose-to-the-science-only-grindstone, but share art and wonder with the world. Share away, O Illuminatrice, I say to myself, share away!

The Onion
Wislawa Szymborska

the onion, now that's something else
its innards don't exist
nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist
oniony on the inside
onionesque it appears
it follows its own daimonion
without our human tears

our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare to go
an internal inferno
the anathema of anatomy
in an onion there's only onion
from its top to it's toe
onionymous monomania
unanimous omninudity

at peace, at peace
internally at rest
inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth
the second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth
a centripetal fugue
polypony compressed

nature's rotundest tummy
its greatest success story
the onion drapes itself in it's
own aureoles of glory
we hold veins, nerves, and fat
secretions' secret sections
not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections

And the moral of this poem is: you can't radiograph an onion. How profound, indeed, how profound.