Tongue Depressors

Waiting for the bus to the clinic, 
I bow my head to keep the rain 
from speckling my glasses.
The curb is blotched  yellow and white
as if covered by lichens.
Stamped into the concrete are the words
WORK PROJECT ADMINISTRATION 1940.
The recessed letters fill up with rainwater,
forming alphabet puddles of waterlogged language.

At my first appointment, waiting for the doctor,
I poke around the room, bored. 
A bulletin board is plastered with slightly off-color
doctor office cartoons.
I unscrew a jar and grab a couple of tongue depressors,
surprised to see they still make them out of wood.
I open a drawer labeled SPECULUMS.
Inside I find a dozen plastic urine sample jars
covered with blue caps. And nothing else.
I try to remember what a speculum is.
I'm pretty sure it's nothing like these.

At my second appointment, 
I notice a plastic rack stuffed 
with out of date magazines.
Carly Simon's crinkled face smiles from the cover
of a six-month-old issue of Neurology Now.
The headline delares
"I HAVEN'T GOT TIME FOR THE PAIN
...OF MEMORY LOSS".

As I wait for the bus back home, 
I watch the workers across the street
rip apart the old Kinko's building. 
The new plywood covering the windows
has already been tagged with graffiti:
a cartoon rodent smiles, eyes bulging,
beneath the word HYRAX
sprayed in dripping letters across the wood. 
On the bus shelter behind me,
some morose vandal has scratched
DESPAIR into the glass
over and over and over again. 
And the rain is bitching louder than ever,
pounding its Morse code complaints across 
this illegible world.