The wires are poking out and a small childish plaster covers over a broken artery, turning to the colour of black pudding. Cold toast sits on a plate next to the smallest vat of salted butter and somewhere amongst whiskey and tiredness, I have become ill again.
Politicians organise themselves like smoking aids for quitting. They claim to start a war against the malformations they rely upon. Old news spreads like rumour as the nurses tend, bend necks over bed-sheets, learning to gossip over the topic of tumours, and suicide rates in men.
Mothers wring their hands beside comatose sons with screws fitted into knee-caps and a procession of staples across the skull. Entropy has sent us here, only partial, always anxious for when the curtain will fall, willing to rely on healing crystals if all medicine fails, as the church cries for prayer or else: acceptance.
The tree-tops peek out and evidence the wind that keeps on blowing, only promising a boundless freedom now that I am removed from it. New patients arrive and leave as fast as it takes me to learn their names. Nothing has changed since I stopped drinking.