Sick Abed by Michael Ceraolo

Here is poem #7 in the Excuse My Dust sequence (poems 4,5, and 6 were published in the 4/5/21 edition of Medusa's Kitchen.

 Sick Abed

After I directed my last short,

which was released May 4, 1917,

it was back to work on features

And the studio got their money's worth:

seven features for the rest of '17,

eight features (and two more shorts)

released in 1918,

eight features released in 1919

March 2, 1919

I was filming The Valley of the Giants

(it would be the sixth of my eight features

released that year),

and the director took the cast and crew

to film exterior scenes

in the Korbel Mountains in Oregon

While enroute the train derailed,

the cars careening down a fifteen-foot embankment

The place of the derailment was isolated:
it took twelve hours for rescue crews to reach us

My back was aching,

and I had a deep cut on my left arm

and some cuts on my head,

but I couldn't just sit around

idly waiting for help to arrive

The training I had received years ago

when I was considering becoming a surgeon

came in handy at this time:

I helped move those unable to move on their own,

bandaged up those cuts that needed it,

even set a prop man's broken fingers

(guilty as charged

of practicing medicine without a license)

Sign of the times:

no one was hospitalized,

and work on the picture resumed the next day

My wounds were camouflaged

by costumes and camera tricks

The studio sent up a doctor

to administer morphine for the blinding headaches

I was suffering from

I didn't miss a day of work

(it took six or seven weeks

to finish the location shooting)

and by the time the picture was done

I was addicted to the morphine

I had been given to enable me

to continue working

Now you understand why

I called 1919 a fateful year