Can the Healer Face His Own Blood

Lyrics

Pantyukhin Cave.
Four degrees Celsius.
The air tastes like iron and wet stone.
And here, wedged in a fissure…
a sealed manila envelope, heavy as a body.

They called you Squeamish Sam.
A quiet joke in the clinic, back in Poland.
You’d unseal the jars.
Hirudo medicinalis, slick and black in the glass.
You’d place them on skin, so gently.
Three jaws. A hundred tiny teeth.
The small, perfect bites of a healer.
You watched them swell, drinking the bad blood away.
A professional calm. Your hands never shook.

But the blood in this envelope, Sam… this is your own.
The test results you carried down two hundred meters of darkness.
Can the man who applies the leech face his own diagnosis?
Can the healer stand the sight of his own blood?
This paper is heavier than any flesh.

The clients on your table, they trusted you.
They saw the cure, not the creature.
But down here, you were the patient.
No white coat, just the damp chill of the Arabika massif.
The drip from the limestone, a clock ticking.
You carried your own name, printed in black ink.
A condition. A prognosis.
The words were the teeth, and you were the skin.

Did you think the darkness would drink it?
That the pressure of the earth could make it disappear?
These leeches you carried, they can consume five times their body weight.
But this… this is a different kind of hunger.
A different kind of weight.
You left the sealed truth here, in the cold, with the silence.
A secret for the stone.

Squeamish Sam.
The healer.
The patient.
Can you ever face your own blood?