You got a nice throwing arm, I think about the nurse with veins who approaches the bedside rail to take away my bedpan.  When you come back, I dig the blood moving through you, below your skin, visible when you stick that needle in my lane, when you hand me that little wrinkled paper bucket full of pink pills.  While I’m lying in this hospital bed, put me at ease because nobody knows the shape I’m in.  If you do, if you bring me the pinks again, I’ll get down on my knees and pretend to pray.  Let me be your chief, let me bust your bronco.  Soothe me, please.  If you do, I’ll stay mute about the combine; I’ll even become your predator or your acceptant prey.  Again, no one knows the shape I am.  Remember the comfort of a lover that pills can’t provide?  I comply with that possibility, but when I do, memory initiates pain in my mind.  Under my head, into the bloodstream.  Let me suckle the contents of that thimble you wear on your pinky finger and then remove to drop more Tic Tacs into.  Milligrams multiply when you supply chemicals, when you periodically abide my plea.  Now—when the composition sets in, I’m driving that mountain highway, I-40 from Asheville west toward Nashville through Knoxville as low-lying clouds surround greenery.  The road swerves as it rises and falls, so I hold tight the wheel.  Rain on the windshield spits faster than washed-up wipers with tractor trailers encroaching in the near distance, whose drivers imbibe uppers galore like hopped-up typists as they pass my backside.  Fog shrouds the caravan of semis in the rearview, temporarily vanishing as a blindspot in the driver’s side mirror until they reappear and startle me and, in turn, I startle the passenger in the passenger seat, so she attempts to calm my nerves by playing a live version of the song, “Nurse With The Pills,” and, even though I remain jumpy, I start to settle in and accept the course until the drool on my pillow reminds me there’s still a catheter attached before pulling off the road and into a truck plaza parking lot surrounded by gas stations and fast food chains that promote happy meals complete with cyanide pills with hopes that a few heads of state will enter the drive thru ready to play a round of roulette.