I am Living In My Pancreas
“For my old home is now behind me.
Faith is my new home.”
― Sophocles – Philoctetes
An enterprise I own but have never visited,
a little factory on auto pilot since birth,
operating in the background, doing its job meal after meal.
In a bio 101 textbook, I peeled away the transparent overlays of the anatomy,
found it, shaped like a tadpole, in the tangled nexus of red and brown tissue
near the rib cage, curled snugly under the highway
that traffics food to my body’s processing plant.
Through the fog of the CAT scan I could see
a dark shadow hovering over the head of the tadpole,
but there was no evidence that production had slowed yet.
Oddly, POEMS entered into the discussion of things,
not as an ode or sonnet but as a syndrome –
squatters living in the folds and fissures,
with names like characters from a Greek tragedy:
Polyneuropathy, Organomegaly, Endothelial, Monoclonal.
Charles Carr lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is retired after 45 years
working in Community based Social Services. He has published three
books of poems: paradise, pennsylvania ( Cradle Press, St Louis, 2008),
Haitian Mudpies and Other Poems (Moonstone Press, Philadelphia, 2012),
and forthcoming in December, Eat This Poem (Noonstone Prees, 2023). He is the host of a live monthly
broadcast “Philly Loves Poetry” that features poets from the region.