At The Hospital

Awfully, so awfully glad to leave that place
so relieved to exit where time and hope are 
an inexhaustible sinkhole of fear and despair 
for those entering in a state of near comatose 
trust that miracles will occurand they too 
will leave with the exuberance with which 
we burst through those swinging doors into 
the bright sunlight of a perfect day.
Gathering place for the halt, the lame and
the blind stumbling, wobbling, hesitant
examples of humanity in their most perilous
period of life's old age, death galloping
hard behind, as their arteries stiffen, their
kidneys and livers surrender, their hearts
and lungs fail along with eyesight and
hearing, and the obese vestiges of an
earlier era barely discernible becoming the
temporary responsibility of the medical
community and its technological advances
to interpret and diagnose both pedestrian and
exotic disease, chronic handicaps, mental
stagnation, desperate to catch up with the
veritable avalanche of humanity's detritus
in need. The blighted sight of their bloated
defeated essence fascinates and frightens
those not yet in the grip of finality. And you
my friend, witness to the spectacle were there
in view of your own age-dysfunctional failure
though bearing of course no resemblance
however remote to that cascading inevitability
of the irreversible decay of human flesh...