All have their dream of healing.
Waking to birdsong, leaf-light, dawn
bursting like a sack of wheat; or

gently buoyed in perfumed water,
to emerge, towelled and smiling,
helpless beneath anointing hands.

Not this corridor of polished ice,
lit by a striplight’s epileptic
shudder, a gleaming dance floor

where you are your only partner,
your only dance, a thorazine shuffle.
Here you pace out what little space

your mind allows. Elsewhere, others
escape into pain, precise, negotiable:
carcinoma, malign perhaps, but

a language we can still pronounce.
Words cannot survive here,
not at this depth,

they curl at the edges,
snap, become their origins,
a cry, the scream you were born with.

In this fraternity of strangers,
love is masked in a simple truth
and schooled in the torturer’s art –

you part the flesh to find the bone.



Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead 1986