Scene one: a cubicle in A & E
For what is death
If not escape
From pain in this world
And promise in the next?
The words sermon-like. Disembodied. A narrator.
A bed of music. Pings and beeps. The baseline drone of a ventilator.
The curtains close to end the scene.
The cast, dressed in scrubs of blue and green,
Exit stage left
While the leaving lady has a costume change
The audience, not expecting this plot twist, wide-eyed, bereft
Scene two: the family room
An anteroom with a bed-come-trolley
A single moulded plastic seat
A crate of children’s toys and, legs and arms in supplication, a plastic dolly.
An Egyptian mummy (from Finchley)
Swabbed and swaddled visual sterilisation.
What you came in bagged for crime scene investigation
Or soiled clinical waste marked for incineration.
You in sweet repose
Beyond caring if you’re wearing (remember what you used to say) fresh underwear in case of hospitalisation.
Me one third of an unholy trinity
Mother, son and daughter
In communion no wine
Just bread white sheets
Dipped in blood which never looked brighter
And the powder blue lid
On a fluted plastic jug of water
Served at side room temperature
From a stack of flimsy see through cups
That don’t resist
The clench of a tight-balled fist
Because we’re holding on so tight
Under the migraine flicker of fluorescent light
(Low hum)
For fear of losing grip
And letting all this slip…
A simple wooden cross
A side table
A bible with an unsticking plaster “do not remove” label
Some leaflets about loss
And a phone connected by a tiny silver rosary chain
To a laminated card: to speak to the chaplain
Press 0 and ask reception
Go on I say
Let’s order up a resurrection
In the family chapel where even the non-believers pray
And laugh in the face of death because all tears are from the same saline dissolution
Drip, drip, drip until the end of day.
Scene three: a hospital mortuary
The unusually dead are portered to their unmaker for dissection
Pathologists weigh your innards, slice your brain
Sluice your fluids down the drain.
Leaving you unmade. Bits worn. Bits broken. A catalogue of parts.
Coronary sclerosis stilled your no longer beating heart
That and the awful, unstoppable arc
Of an upturned walking stick
In the two handed grip
Of geometry and physics (them and Mrs Clarke)
Her unspeakable role. And your last words: I feel sick
Recorded on a high res vid on the hi viz vest
An end of life jacket. I’ve watched this bit a thousand times, know the rest…
Captains Courageous. Spencer Tracy
Yea-ho little fish, don’t cry, don’t cry.
Yea-ho little fish, don’t cry.
Back at the surface, fighting for breath
Is this what they mean by a living death?
Slabbed and gutted in a different way.
Twisting and turning from the scalpel
But no less eviscerated.