Hospital Records

1. Wristband

This wristband is like my watch,
binding me like a contract:
the watch to the world outside these cool walls,
this band to “the protocol”,
the way we use tags on stock
to accompany them from pasture to processing,
from ward to where are you taking me now?

2. Patient Notes

At first you look for moorings, your watch,
which is the outside world, the known one.
But your boots, the trousers folded over the chair
are impassive, they refuse any association.

In here your bearings are fixed by sound, by noise:
footsteps, receding, definite as castanets,
an eruption – the clashing of pans dropped,
the slashing, harsh, bright cymbal-clashing of it

and then it’s swallowed into a hum. Hum like a mantra. Hum.
The wubbly-blur of a trolley’s wheels on lino.
Hearing out in the corridor the traffic and trade of voices,
some raucous as tropical birds, some like the piled-up sound of a highway

at the far end of your street. Globs of syllables –
the unguarded gossip of nurses one wouldn’t expect
they’d want a man to hear. But you are not a man here.
You are not you here. You blip on the monitor, blip … blip.

How easily you frighten visitors, as if they might pitch
into their mortality by entering your version;
their furtive rustling look quickly searching each room
like little animals expecting a predator lurking there.

Then, when it comes, silence as peaceful as the morphine sea,
and as terrifying as one adrift on spars and rigging.
Sleep is your occupation: the school hours when the body
accepts what so far you have refused to do.
Awake is the break you take from this work.

And now as light tips the corner of the brickwork
outside the window and a silver birch shivers,
you realise with the afternoon losing itself into dusk,
how quickly you have merged into this white, arhythmic world,

that you have never known any life other than this one.
A visitor, a relation, anyone, would be alien, an intrusion.

3. Siege
Then seamlessly, the night-shift slips in,
Already the cleaners have been erasing
the work-flirty dance-steps and debris of the day.
Huddled over the cold fire of a desk lamp
they seem like watchmen on a windy parapet,
warming against the long night, wary
of that predator out there, prowling.

4. Leaving Hospital

Outside the light is harder, the air spiced
and to be breathed;
the shape of everything more definite,
brash even.

A magpie’s swoop has the arc of planets sweeping,
another’s call is in stunningly clear hi-fi
as if you had made a re-entry from outer space
and this was the first thing you heard.

Your feet striking solid ground,
you are walking on air.
You are in another, less subtle country entirely.

5. D Ward

Time has them in the bag and is out now, conscripting.
So they’re whoopee-free like kids to do what they please,
though they keep looking at us, seeking our reassurance.
We’re not quite right – too big for them, too noisy with elsewhere,
our skin a little too coarse for their own fine-woven linen faces
but courteously they keep trying to finger the key which might connect .

They remind me of photos of men
banked against a grey stone wall in a bleak Ayrshire sun
recovering from Ypres. Sunken-cheeked, staring
as if through gauze. Pretty much the same as us,
but wary though, not wanting to join in.

Here, we see bent over a cane, a frame, closing like a claw,
bodies the shape of a question mark. The question hovers
like a fluttering kestrel. It’s we who want an answer
that might save us from what we see
while they grip what’s to hand
as if it were their only friend in a crowd of strangers
and gaze down to the far end of the corridor,
out to the limit of the known world.

Some concentrate on their next step grimly,
a shuffle equal to the challenge of Everest.
Some even seem at ease – like lions stretched out
behind a moat at an open-range zoo,
waiting the day’s next big thing, food…maybe;
sprawling , hair, skin, genitals escaping confinement,
ample as a satisfied uncle after Christmas dinner.

There are even those who, like royalty smile benignly,
blissful and gracious within their own, always-sunny, kingdom.