The Hospital Trilogy Part Two - Asylum Daze
This joke has worn thin, it’s a membrane of gauze
which insulates feelings and never gives pause
to express the frustrations, self hatred and fear
of existence defined by lung-blood and beer.
Each day is a nightmare, each night sheer hell
when I can’t rid myself of the memory and smell
or the stress and the strain of a pointless day’s toil
in a cracked sort of twilight that tastes of dead soil.
Anaesthetized, programmed, my mind running cold,
fixed smile on my lips that feels centuries old;
through urine and faeces and bile and despair
I try hard not to tear out what’s left of my hair.
What a mindless profession I’ve taken to heart
in this war of attrition that rips lives apart;
there’s no wisdom, no succour, no comfort to give,
no cure for the stricken or chance they will live.
Brain cells are miasmas of stark atrophy,
behaviourally slaughtered, wild thoughts roaming free
through a fairground of broken up structures and dreams
in a wasteland of dopamine ricochet screams.
Dazed and confused and disorientated,
the crippled and aged whose minds have stagnated
in leather bound skulls housing dull vacant eyes
as they stumble their way to a thoughtless demise.
King Solomon, people, don’t live in this place,
we pretend that he does but it shows on my face;
I’m deluded and burnt-out, a white coated shell
and if anyone cares here they’ve hidden it well.
Their time was up years past, they’ve only reliance,
preserved and half pickled by medical science;
a loved one, a husband, a wife or a friend,
parked up a cul-de-sac, right ‘round the bend.
Yet they’ve lived more than I have, these sad walking dead,
I’m the garbage man mercenary perched at the bed,
I am lifeless, less feeling than they’ll ever be:
if you don’t fool with dead things then don’t fool with me.
Copyright © Tony Bush | Year Posted 2005
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