In a wonderful world where grass sprouts and divided cells sing the words of the Elevator Blues, which unofficially goes, “Give a little piece of the pie, we would all love to be refined,” Aaron Veedon was popped out and turkey bastered to breathing.  His heart, the four-chambered rhythm machine already formed and months old, fluttered to a start without any maternal guidance.  Every time his mother ate, sang, laughed, played records, got into a scented bath, or was touched gently on the back of her neck or along the skin that ran from her armpit to her hip her heart would flutter to start and Aaron Veedon’s heart would flutter to start and frankly Aaron Veedon had just about had it with all that bullshit.  He was out now and god of his heart, fellow traveler and disciple of it, too.
Aaron had a normal head (mushy and pointed) and had all the regular baby aesthetics going for him, at least for the first few minutes.  Aaron was hosed off, but as the yellowing globs of afterbirth slumped onto the sterile tile so did Aaron’s first few layers of mauve skin, sadly and with a plop.  Aaron Veedon’s skin shined as onion paper does in its dull glossy way. From the brim of his felty top to his mouse’s toes there shown all the inner things that skin very often covers.  Aaron Veedon was red, blue, and green and he never cried out.  Instead he lay still, grabbing at his toes, clutching, and rocking himself to a smile when he became restless. His heart, that four-chambered rhythm machine, pounded its thin seagrass tresses.  The attending nurse didn’t quite scream, but rather sighed some breathy words and brought Aaron and his sheath into the Veedon’s room some minutes later alongside of a doctor. 
“Have you been sleeping on your side, Mrs. Veedon?” the doctor asked, fingering his nametag the way young doctors do. 
“Is something wrong?” the drugged-up, round-faced woman lulled, “I roll in my sleep sometimes, yes.”
“He’s got about 48 minutes left, I’d say.”  The doctor tugged up his white coat’s sleeve and checked. 
The Veedons began to move on, cutting orange slices and molding Mr. Veedon’s leftover parmesan chicken tin foil swan into a soccer ball.  Aaron made friends quickly.  He soared in protective footy pajamas in outstretched arms and greeted the lines of incubating infants, like all good people, without a movement of mouth or hand or arm, but rather with a noticeable movement of his insides.  Nurses performed Shakespeare and Mrs. Veedon read Rilke.  Albums were played, beginning with a Little Mermaid cassette and brimming over afterward and all together with David Bowie, Moonlight Sonata, and all the other smatterings of human culture the hospital occupants and staff could muster.  Mrs. Veedon claimed that Aaron needed the fruit, not the pit.
Someone sat him down in front of a television and flipped through the channels in 2-3 second intervals twice over.  He was given a world history lesson with all of the highly toted civilizations, modern and ancient, summed up into easily digestible sentences. He hit all the major world cities, which were set up in different rooms of the Intensive Care Unit on the second floor.  Everything went smoothly until the few people setting up the Bratislava room got in a fight over the ethnic content.  The smoke coming from the Asian rooms exasperated the Bratislavans even more and a rumble ensued. To fill the lost time Aaron was sent to and visited an NA meeting, a philosophical discussion concerning Plato’s Symposium, and a church.
Aaron had learned a lot during the time spent on his education, but he couldn’t help but to feel as if things were missing.  He sat stagnant and watched the ceiling as the hospital crowd quibbled outside his window.  They played happy music for Aaron and he cried.  They blew trumpet noises through pieces of grass and Aaron turned his silent face towards them and thought:  How he’d lost his poem.  How he couldn’t bring himself to look Jacky, his love interest whom he’d met and traveled through half of the ICU’s Europe with, in the eye.  How he possibly had been before and always would be condemned to a certain infantile nothingness. 
Aaron drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and, in a few words, had an artistic breakdown.
Mr. Veedon squeezed his temples with the tips of his fingers.  He took Aaron up into his hands and became a maypole, the final minutes flitting away and they spun about the room’s tan equipment. And through red-lit veiny eyes the Veedons, father and son, realized the slats of the window.  The gentle, constant pressing of light.  A light that did not stop for the doctors, the Veedons, or Jacky.  Purple faced and hardly breathing the Veedons ran through automatic sliding doors and the halls of the hospital towards the sun.