A&E247

How did it feel when you first realised

that there’s a whole building in every reasonable sized town

and it’s full of people whose only job

is to keep you personally alive?

And it doesn’t matter what you do on the outside

cause we’re all the same sitting in A&E

for eighteen hours waiting to be seen

surrounded by twin aromatics of human shit and antiseptic.

There’s a grumbling snoring youth lying on the floor cause there’s no seats left

he’s about 17 I would say. He comes with support workers free;

I know this cause he woke up and kicked off cause it wasn’t his turn yet

and the police told his entourage to calm him down. They know each other well.

An airport lounge but the planes have long gone

the announcements bring hope it’s your time.

Don’t sleep: keep one ear open lest you miss your name

in case you miss your slot to be cannulated.

Opposite there’s a bloke shackled to a prison guard

with another sat watchful by his side

this lad’s got shanked over the pasta bake

stabbed in the head and the hand and he says he doesn’t know why.

And the blue striplights hum and hypnogogia descends;

time slows to beyond a stop. All the world is banished.

There is nowhere else, just this polished-floor nothingness

and I stare into space and listen to my lungs crackle.

An old man is handed a bacon bap:

“Tomato sauce, love. It’s on me.” That’s a smile of humanity right there.

I don’t think she knows him, but she’s looking out for him.

I don’t think he really knows where he is.

Gradually she ekes out the story:

he’s had a fall. He’s confused. He has a house

but he doesn’t want to go back there alone

he doesn’t know how to get there, not from here,

and I wonder how often he’s here. Whether

that fall was recent. Whether it was a while back.

Whether in his mind time has congealed into something seeping

but solid, where he remembers to go to A&E,

but forgets he’s been here a hundred days in a row

and maybe the staff know, and they dutifully book him in

and take his bloods and do his pulse and all that

and send him to wait where it’s safe and warm.

It’s their job to protect him from harm.