13.

Two days ago, sat with a bag of pick n mix, 

my back rammed into the corner of the sofa

for support against the spasms.

Timings on a scrap of paper, 8:15, 8:27 and on

and on every 15 mins.

Tom Cruise in my living room,

hearing the news.

14.

The quality of exhaustion

when edges fade and you try to push words off

your tongue but they resist

(like dust balls behind old furniture)

like the ricocheted echoes of pain.

One day you’ll sleep again.

15.

And maybe I’m fragmented like the words,

the way they echoed around me in rippled

waves as fingers and injections inched. 

Can’t settle. Can’t focus. I know this place well.

16.

Little pots of orange juice

with a hard to open pull back lid. 

Long window to my right with a view I can’t

see over clinical waste bins. 

A woman howling. Was that today or tomorrow?

(Velvet pigeons call me back, their staggered calls like an unfinished thought. Are they distracted like me?)

Waiting for Woman 2

with hope clinking in a stainless steel tray.

Later she leaves with the tray and my resilience. 

Night. 

Just the silence of the ticking clock

and their faux leather chair I couldn’t sleep in.

As though I was in that room

for the rest of my life, 

in a mobius strip craving the meds

they locked away till morning.

I talk to the walls, they understand me.

17.

Ribcage expands and contracts. 

Faces merge into one.

I watch the door open and close as though

there were movements, 

as though there were places beyond the bed. 

Dr with a strawberry blond bob

says surgeons won’t work on Sundays.

The clock laughs at me. 

Later I can’t even hold a tea cup.

I feel the scalding water but don’t care. 

18.

Johnny V sweeps in with his slicked back hair

and striped shirt, says it’ll be a long day.

He lives by the sink, hand washing, 

far away in the corner 

while I wait for the voices

to stop spiralling around me.

Battling the nurse with her faceless face. Sometimes she’s upside down on a meat hook. How would she like that? How would she cope?

I failed the ice test the first time. 

They haul me up.

Soon I’ll watch peaks on a graph.

I’ll observe them like the Petri dish I live in.

My limbs fade. I am data points on a chart.

Time passes

Hands tick around regardless,

steel wheels wheel me away

to a little green curtain 

shielding me from their tinkering,

precision work, 

searing white lights and the clink of metal

If I could make sound I’d roar

until my mouth split 

until my throat bled wide and glorious 

in the irrelevance of pain.

And where my abdomen used to be

lilies bloomed, loud like a heartbeat

Ceilings came and went under the sheer love.❤️