It is the absence that appals

Locked windows

White walls

Chemotherapy exchange

Deep night invading day,

Has that bird called Hope flown away? 

I walk around muttering,

Now the background buzz

Of machines

Is hushed by nurses

My mind is a stone

Sinking

My heart a frozen block of ice

And nothing, no nothing, will suffice.

Time flees to young oncology

And is welcomed

 ‘How long, for how long?’

The glint-eyed hawk

Of the imagination sweeps

Over me

As I rehearse my lines

And conjugations

Most carefully.