Charades

[addy]

Shrinks him with notebook and pencil
stuck in the throat of her table.

A flower suspended;
plucking at petals
leaves only its Latin label.

Sex and Death, we guess.
She shakes her head,
hand forming I have no problem with these last two lines, but if you're bothered it may have to do with the word "forming"? It's a creative act that turns something amorphous into something with a concrete shape, at odds with the (very clever and appropriate ) "illegible scribble" this finishes with
illegible scribble.

This is wonderful, and of layered for something so short. Brava, sir.

i think the poem is most fascinating for its glaring gap. The title is "charades", and you manufacture for us a short comparison by having an unspeaking teacher who's writing stuff down and goading her students at guessing a diagnosis. Though if you study it, "charades" makes most sense describing the difficulty for the patient, who should be here in this poem but isn't, who cannot make himself understood, who is instead picked apart as a puzzle, a game. The patient's human presence is deliberately absent here, excised. There is a metaphor for him in the second stanza, stripped of all personification, individuality, and agency (and again only the metaphor is present here, not him). The table may be a projection of him, too. Objects, furniture, the silent elephant in the room and then just gone. Done with. Amazing stuff.