Reading in a Hospital

Texts, and tests, and tension.

Patients walk past,

Young nurses, pretty,

Laugh with a resident,

While I sit like a fixture.

Do they wonder what I’m like,

What it’s like to be me?

How can they,

When they pull in bodies,

And watch some leave,

Standing, or not?

 

A sneeze breaks out behind me.

I’m thrust from Virginia Woolf’s,

Room of One’s Own,

Until the sterile haze of fluorescent lights,

Have killed the pestilence, maybe.

 

The schizophrenic across from me,

Is very concerned with my reading.

Her tongue darts around her mouth,

Incessantly.

She cannot help it.

She will have a room of her own,

I assume.

 

Doctors pass in a pack and I hide my eyes,

In the words that might vindicate my soul.

No Shakespeare, Beethoven, or God.

We are the words, the music, the thing itself.

 

Outside there is a graveyard,

(Convenient, in this city)

And in it there are headstones,

And on the stones are words,

And we are the words.

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

poets can be a bit crazy, they can physically harm themselves and someday will find their names on those headstones..

yes, poets/ poems...one in the same...we are all works in progress, and hopeful we don't end up in that hospital for the lame or psychologically deranged.

jacob

[LJW]

A bit disjointed. Parts of this are brilliant. Maybe it's just me, but what I find disjointed is that it seems in stanza 1 that you are speaking of a physical hospital. As I continue to read It seems like you maybe speaking of a psychiatric hospital. My sensibilities want this to be more clear. in stanza 1 you mentioned something about the patient standing or lying. So I am assuming this is the hospital for medical ailments. the last stanza is absolutely brilliant

[Holly Mason]

like the added near by grave yard what a scene that places in the readers mind
very good write
thank you for sharing

[Marie]

Very like a hospital waiting room...the nearby graveyard an added poignancy...