A hospital ward has replaced my home
Who am I now?
Medication seduces me. I crave its attention/
It’s my prince charming. My knight on a white stallion
Who spirits me away to a dreamless state
Where relief waits
Drudgery of time spent uselessly, fruitlessly.
Waiting in the silence
Where the oxygen tank lives at my right hand side
Death stomps about impatiently
It’s a rich picking ground
How many times must he be cheated?
His breath slides beneath the sheets insidiously silent
He won’t be held back indefinably.
He glowers at the bleeping machinery
That blinks owl eyed reminding him life still lingers
.He’s had enough of waiting
He will find a way, don’t you agree with me?
He’ll foil the world of medical elasticity
Breach the protection of the soft footfall of the nurses
Who stretch and wind life’ time mechanically
With buttons and trailing tubular fittings
Who owns my life at this moment in time?
Do I exist only at the whim of a machine now?
Stripped of my materialist self
How do nurses know who I am? The life I’ve led?
As they deftly record in folders colour coded
To signify the body they see before them
Care measured, delivered. Procedure followed
Each day much as another
Hands comfort – Release pain – offer oblivions
Don’t you see?
It is them who own my life now
And all the while Death waits impatiently
Gemma Hill Dec 2017 ©
Gemma Hill Writeyou Writeme 