Outside in the corridor

Staring at my trainers

And the soup drip stain

On the thigh of my jeans

Wishing I had change for the vending machine.

 

Porters wheel stretcher beds

Bearing bulging bellies

Grunting in discomfort

Cursing the pain

They swear they won't go through again

Until the next time

The next and the next after that.

 

The doors swish open

The groaning chorus swells

They swish shut

It goes quiet

Until the next one gets wheeled in.

 

Is that hollering for gas and air

From my bird or some other blokes?

 

God I'm gasping for a fag.

 

Did my dad sit and smoke

A cigarette in an Izal stinking corridor

While he was waiting and mum was labouring?

 

I saw him once in real life

I glimpsed his back as he walked away

I must have been no more than three

I have him in a photograph

Mum and bits of him

His left leg, left arm and hand

Wedding corsage on half a jacket,

No face - brim of a fedora.

 

If I put the photo to a mirror there

Might be most of a hat, arm, leg

Reflected.

But still no face and nothing in between.

 

If he was here

With his arm on my shoulder,

“Son, you're a father... Cigar?”

Would I take his advice?

Heed his hackneyed banalities

Or follow his lead and disappear

Into thin air and freedom

Like his father before him?

 

My face reflected in a curtained window,

My features forming accusation

Or exoneration.

Blame or no blame?

 

No jury would convict me

The judge would say,

“You cannot be held accountable

You inherited a dreadful imbalance

You had no example to follow

You are free to go without a stain.”

 

Would leaving be a nobler sacrifice

Than muddling through

A sorry blind mans buff of married life

Stumbling, colliding, wounding,

Inflicting shambling hurts on wife and child

Until they hate me for what I became

Until only an empty mirrored frame remained

A hollow man with neither face nor heart?

 

The doors swish open

A bed groans in

More cursing,

Tormented yodelling

More shouting.

 

I need a cig to clear my head.

Fresh air

A walk.

 

Time to think.