Hospital Beds

Once the white lights dizzy your eyes
illuminating a porcelain doll face –
broken,
The limbs forget how to live,
just as you forget to breathe on your own.

Wheeled away, incapable-
Shoved in the panic of the waiting room
with all the dying
and faces spinning like your childhood top off a broken sidewalk.

Same ghosts.

Name gets called with an identity as good as a number,
another face to be dragged onto what was once his slumbering place.

Same daze.

The steel forces its way inside, like a raped appendage.
Draining me,
filling me up with new drugs.
That is the way He always talked about a remedy.

Muffled voices
and the rushing of a card game
with strangers behind curtains.

I ask Him “Did he die here?”,
with a parched throat.

But what I really mean is, will I die here too?