Like The Surgeon's Knife--revision 2

[addy]

Convalescing at home,
but I am not alone.
On my chest, St. John Keats.
His verse To Fanny piques
open his (would "this" be a good alternative, to allude to your own chest? Just a taste thing, but you can ignore this suggestion) ravaged heart,
vies to heal by his art.

My right, Henry Thoreau.
Pens Walden Pond to show
he’d not conform and tries (I think "tries" sounds a little... unsure? For what your going for. But since you're trying to preserve the rhyming I understand if you keep it)
to heal through nature’s eyes.
Whip-poor-wills help us cope.
The Woods will give us hope. (Maybe it's because these last two lines are both short, abrupt sentences, but I though the rhyming was too obvious)

My left, Albert Camus.
Unmasks our milleau,
indicts us in The Fall
with our sickly call (this line fails you a bit... not very inspired compared to the others before and after)
for grins of subterfuge
gilded (enjambment kind of trips up here?) by modern rouge.

As I lie in this bed,
their words live in my head.
And like the Surgeon’s Knife
that saved my own short life.
What Fate that might have been.
No poems, books from them. (Not keen on this closing. I love what your trying to say, "but poems, books..." which sounds like "poems and/or books..." makes the line sound sloppy for no good reason.. just imo)

I'm of two minds about this edit. Structurally it improved and it's a lot cleaner, though there are some slight issues with enjambment. In some places, i believe that the problem was from focusing too much on just the end rhyming. But overall it gave a clear, confident, and sufficiently nuanced narrative.

But... a small part of me likes the original as well, thematically speaking. I think when you cleaned up the poem, a lot of the strength and directness of your original metaphor got dialed down. For instance, I liked how the "at my left... at my right" was like an anatomical analysis, with specific writers aiding specific "ailments" in the soul/body metaphor. In this version that implication I think still exists but is less clear. Of course, I think just a little rewrite (of this rewrite) will easily remedy this