I try and be nice(sacrifice achieve sainthood!)

to quiet the voice tell me I ain't good

and though I've retired from the nursing station

the scent linger to me, I don't lose the patients;

I still have the patience of homo sapiens

but one day perhaps....I'll be a saint!

The mother-in-law has vascular dementia -

she move in with us, what a great adventure!

The daily search for spectacles and dentures - 

"This a queer toothpaste, I don't care for it much"

she brushed with the cream for vaginal thrush.

Her memory bank has run out of credit,

she don't know she's here and I can't forget it.

Friends say Fool! to persist in this folly, Ray,

au contraire, I'm on a permanent holiday.

We wake in Paris and then we in Texas,

we travelled all around the world since breakfast,

all continents and  corners of the room we visit

on her old age pension and free bus-ticket.

She pause for a chat with her mother and sister,

the yellowing lampshade and the aspidistra;

we're twilight kissed in a wistful ambience,

we four play whist and I hear an ambulance

siren screaming swoop on the haunted,

too much meaning, let  emotions be blunted

by a pill, a drink or a frontal lobotomy:

I'll be the patron saint of monotony

and give up listening to the hip-hop band,

be a paid-up member of The Crazy Gang,

laugh at cheeky chappies, meet Vera Lynn

and sit here waiting for the war to begin.

Sundays we dose up on old-time religion;

I hear her sing as I pray in the kitchen

"Oh, when the saints go marching in,

Oh, when the saints go marching in"

and unless there's been an almighty blunder

I've booked my spot, I shall be in that number.