1. BIRTHDAY DAY
Pollock lipstick

vagabond slippers, the snug imprisonment of tracksuits

smeared with 11:30 soft-diet lunch.
Begin to hope the progress

behind pharmacological ramparts.

The real medicine is touch

all other expertise unnecessary.
I am now a fixture here

the nurses chat at visits, even read my books

between wiping bums and perennially guiding Tommy back to bed.

Clinical notes recorded on the verge –

chasms of new molecules, pneumonic harmonica and missing teeth.

I sing along at this birthday party

when everybody else thinks it's theirs.

Cordial and cake fly like confetti

slow motion kindergarten.

There's the bazaar worth of plots afoot

scheming over nothing

stolen glasses

or dentures.  Pirates are aloft in the rigging of their wheelchairs/

aluminium walking-frames glint dangerously in a

gatecrashed sunlight that cranks gaiety to a cackled fever.

 

 

2. PICK ME UP
Each visitor is like a death, still hanging on

rusted to every mother as she's caught keening into where.
The constant spatter of TVs

worlds coming in to seduce away facts

that have still clung on

(steel hooks in the cerebellum).

Always music somewhere

cassette recordings of pianos built with ceramic tiles instead of strings

Underneath the Arches

We'll Meet Again

(and just once My Generation sent a ripple of fear

through attendant babyboomers).

The heart patch of fort nursed,

mouths open like day

eyes turn tail in prayer

for this week's Dearly Departed.

 

 

3. KIND REGARDS
My mother is “such a lady”

and they love her in the way

of pedestrian driftwood, stars and paper cuts.

The dependable burn of cigarettes,

flags of clarity and abyss, alternate horrors each

in separate ways. Time as soil erosion.

Some kind of word in a sleeping night.

Commonwealth Care Standards

and the guilt of children.
Nothing here is unmanaged

yet there's a kind of anarchy,

painted over every three months and

marked on coloured charts.
Families play a hackneyed role –

their fret, love

and secret wishings.

It washes over staff who've seen it before.

There are always better,

always worse actors for these parts.

It's a morality play

written in DNA

´cause Mum's dementia

will probably be our inheritance.

Partners and doctors monitor afternoon snores,

measure our decay.

 

 

4. LOST POST
This is some kind of harvest

old flesh on brittle bones

and grey wheat above

episodic eyes.

Who says death is better?

Most of us

(today- tinned salmon in a weak tomato sauce).

Usually not the residents

rusted in

sometimes even the mad, tender collegiality

of senescent love affairs –

even though she calls him

by another name and his face

is netted alongside unrelated memories.
In the sound of the sun,

every day is new.

Ambulances arrive

more regularly than friends –

there's the thrill of the ride

beneath panic, balms

and the silent rite of agony.
These veterans wear their ribbons of scars.

Pain management.

Come half past five everyone breathes easier, a sort of tranquillity,

when That Bloody Vera starts nodding off.