Mad Doctors

Even as children they always went too far.
What will happen, they kept thinking,
if I pull that switch, strike this match?
Maybe no one told them not to,
or explained, logically, what could go wrong.
Then they were playing with lightning,

wondering what they would do if they didn't
have to die. Consider Doctor Cyclops,
stuck in the middle of the jungle
with his radium, making things small.

It's 1940, five years before Hiroshima.
Even the science wasn't on our side.
In the movie, Dick Decker's
shaved head makes him monstrous
and impressive, and a little like a child.
Yet he seems to have no past--

no wife to bring back from the dead,
no motive for evil, nothing but research.
His eyes are bad and he hardly sleeps.
We should remember Doctor Cyclops

from time to time, and Doctor Frankenstein,
Doctor Jekyll, and Doctor X.
They were all deceived by ambition,
although they believed themselves
betrayed by the world.

Maybe no one ever told them
we don't live forever.
Maybe no one explained, exactly,
the logic of it.

-Lawrence Raab (published in Gulf Coast, Summer/ Fall '08)