David Gairdner - Cabinet

• Medicine

• The mirror/bathroom

• Behind the visage

• Behind the glass and film

• Lies the medicine cabinet.

• I peel back the mirror’s face, to what is inside.

• As if God peeks under the flesh to find the soul.

• The ingredients of my soul are old Greek names, olanzapine, aspirin and Valium.

• Plato’s tongue finds the daemon in chemistry.

• The pharmacist’s hand is chief arbiter of metaphysics.

• The overhead lights far brighter than the shafts of sun falling into the Pantheon

• My hand passes past the mirror and over the shelves of the cabinet.

• I jiggle out a tablet from the mouth of a container into the mouth it was designed for.

• It dissolves inside my body and the forms appear duller. The world’s corners don’t seem to poke me as much.

• I ingest a new soul, piss out the old one.

• I walk a kilometre in someone else’s shoes but they still don’t fit.

• A child stares at me as I pull my face from the hinges and finds an empty shelf of ribs.