Tony Dawson

A MODERN FRANKENSTEIN

Limping towards me was a sad amputee
as if he had been in an accident or three.
He’d lost his right leg and his left arm,
“How on earth did you come to suffer such harm?”

“It was the surgeon’s price for a liver,” he said.
because without a new liver I would be dead.
“I had to trade in two limbs and pay cash
Like trading a car in, though you might think it rash.”

“Why does the surgeon need an arm and a leg?”
“To put a limb on a sailor whose leg is a peg.”
And as I was wondering where this would all end,
he added, “in exchange for a kidney and money to spend.”

As for the arm, the waiting list’s a long one!
and dear old sawbones would never shun
those needing two, so as to hug their wives
even if they flinch when they see his knives.”

It’s a funny old world where people will part
with chunks of their bodies to get a new heart,
and having to settle the balance with pots
of money just for the surgeon to buy a few yachts.


Tony's YouTube video reading of "A Modern Frankenstein":



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Tony confesses: "The theme of this poem was triggered when I read that an 82-year-old surgeon admitted to withdrawal symptoms because he hadn’t been able to perform transplants during the pandemic. Then I thought of the poor in other countries who were obliged to sell one of their kidneys to survive financially…"

TONY DAWSON has lived in Seville since 1989. His writing has appeared in print in Critical Survey, Shoestring Press, Poems-for-All, Chiron Review, Pure Slush and Loch Raven Review, as well as online at London Grip, The Five-Two, The Syndic Literary Journal, Horror Sleaze and Trash, Cajun Mutt Press, Poetry and Covid, Beatnik Cowboy, and Home Planet News.