"Waiting Room Distraction"

I do not know you
Standing at the back
Of the queue
In your John Lennon
T-shirt
Minus the bullet holes.
Do you feel hurt
Working Class Hero
As emblazoned on your chest
Is this what it’s come to?
Stuck in a hospital queue
For another test?
Is that what you imagined
When you were young
What happened to the hopes
And dreams that you sung?
All you have left
Is this drudgery queue
Oh to be young again
Without a clue.
The worst thing with middle age
Is not being closer to death
It’s muttering about it
In case it’s your last breath.
Honestly, man in the queue
I’ve now idea how
You’ve led your life
You could be perfectly happy
With two kids and a wife.
Will you end up like me
Getting wound up in a chair
Thinking that the N.H.S.  don’t care?
My appointment’s late
And I have to wait…
For what?
I have no future.
Have you?
Is this all I’ve got?
I need to be positive
And look ahead
As I’m a long way
From being dead.
I think...not yet on the brink.
Eventually my body
Will wear me down
Not that I was ever
Up for nights on the town.
For the rest of my life
I’m that man
In the queue
While sizing everyone else up
In this N.H.S. Zoo.
 
Dulwich Poet 5^th November 2013
 
(I wrote this to stop winding myself up, sat in the waiting room, while waiting for a delayed out-patients appointment at Lewisham Hospital. Scribbling anything down was to deflect my self-inflicted simmering anger at waiting so long. I notice a man, probably late fifties, early sixties, in the receptionist queue, wearing a John Lennon t-shirt, as he probably did when he was a teenager)