we all sit facing the front

on chipped tubular steel chairs

 

each crudely marked with a sharpie,

‘X-Ray’ evidently some are known to

have escaped as far as A&E,

 

obediently we await our call

silently ill-at-ease, contemplative,

 

but there is one exception, a gorgon

who enters, child in tow, for whom

nothing has ever been, or ever will be,

satisfactory and quickly we learn about

her entire complex medical history,

 

unwittingly we have become the audience

of a circus of the peculiar, a mismatched club

that none of us have consciously paid to join,

 

a stream of variety acts on trolleys

parade past like buses, often in threes

carrying pallid deathly patients, who

wince and grown to garner sympathy

as they are wheeled carefully by as if

for our perusal,

 

© Graham R Sherwood 1/25