A Life-time Measured Out In Dentists' Chairs

This serial monogamy, a life-long quest
a slow gavotte of fear and misplaced trust.
How many outsize sunflower lights have dazzled
as if they were interrogating spies?
How many fingers (gloved / ungloved)
have fumbled in my pink and secret mouth?
How many faces come too close and peered,
their breath sour with the stench of power?
How will it end? My toothless grin attended by
some sapling, squeaking with his new ideas?

The first was old as God, stone deaf,
moon eyes through bottle-bottom glasses,
and aspen, tremulous hands. She set the scene
those days before injections. Drill and be Damned.
Mum bought me sweets on the way home
when blind drill skidded into gums.

The next anaethesised but left his calling card
a great bruise blooming up my cheek.
One played rock music to divert me from his hands
which danced across my chest in search of instruments.
Some used hygenists for their dirty work
masked like bank robbers, leaving no fingerprints.
At University I must have been checked up
but so much of those years is brain-cell dead,
and Wisdom, once aquired, must be extracted.
The hospital dentist levered, prised and groaned
before he hack-sawed out a slip of bone.


I went to women then, aimed to be chums,
gagged and gurgled in response to chat
lay silent, open mouthed, while one bought gifts
from Christmas catalogues, brandished by the nurse,
but Scrooge-refused to prescribe pain relief.

I’ve tried both hemispheres, both genders, gentile, Jew
my goal just one, to whom I can be true.
The grail of love so like its limping stepsister
the search for cheap, efficient, painless dentistry.