"In The Waiting Room"

Is this really the reality

Week after week

Month after month

Year after fucking year?

Scouring and devouring

Column by column

Page by page

Today’s edition of the ‘Metro’.

The only alternative being

A three month old ‘Country Life’

Perfect for inner city Lewisham

Or the Christmas copy

Of ‘Cosmopolitan’

In flaming June!

Such is life

In the waiting room.

If I ever get to the stage

Where I am like that old dear

Sat rocking in her wheelchair

Thin strands of hair matting

Spittle dribbling out of her cracked

Needlessly lipstick caked mouth

Then, please, do the decent thing

And treat me like you would a horse

Take me outside and have me shot

Then melted down for glue.

Life is hardly a bowl of cherries

Far too healthy for me anyway

But I beg you never let me

End up so desperately lonely

As the old boy opposite

Highlight of his morning being

Swilling & swigging that rancid coffee

From the polystyrene cup

As the nurse stops

For a double take

And asks if he is due to be seen

Right now this early

As he cheerily lets her know

He’s here for his eleven o’clock

As if he’s making a day of it

When it’s not even

Half past nine!

For which the expression

“Good grief!” was invented.

Supposedly I’m still young

At a not so spring chicken forty six

But the great Soprano just pegged it

At a mere fifty one.

Fearful of my own mortality

Knowing I’ll be a young fatality

Whatever hopes and dreams

I once had decades past

Are faded and gone.

Now resigned to an existence

Of hospital waiting rooms

Bandages and pills

Papering over the crack

Of a lifetime of non-achievement

Which is why I retreat

Into my make-believe poetic insularity

Waiting for that final breath

Death-that I both fear and crave for.

Dulwich Poet 21^st June 2013

(Another routine hospital appointment, at the Acute Foot Clinic at Lewisham Hospital, this morning. These are my thoughts, while sitting bored, waiting for my appointment, with the realisation that I am not longer young, something that I have been aware of for quite a while. But it hits home more with more visits to doctors, as age catches up.)