A Come-From-Behind Victory?

Gene makes a late entry in a colonoscopy poetry contest

(Eric Shansby)

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By Gene Weingarten

Sunday, April 12, 2009

To: South Florida's Digestive CARE(TM) Gastroenterology Group

Re: Your Contest for Best New Poem About Colonoscopies

At the risk of sounding pompous, I find the very idea of this contest professionally disrespectful, given my two primary fields of specialization: poetry and human excretory functions. I assume that you are unfamiliar with my oeuvre, otherwise you would have simply given me my free colonoscopy and mailed me the $500 winner's check, as a sort of Irving G. Thalberg lifetime achievement award.

In the meantime:

The Glove Song of J. Alfred Pooprock, Gastroenterologist

With profuse apologies to T.S. Eliot (whose name is an anagram for "toilets").

Let us go then, you and I,

When the time is nigh, and thigh is spread from thigh

And the patient's etherized upon a table.

Let us enter deftly through his seat

(Swift, and yet discreet)

And snake our way along that shadowed, half-deserted street

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