In The Hospital.

Those caustic tears
Cut deep into your features
Like liquid barbed wire.

Sweet aspiration had faltered within you,
Changed by some fierce agency
into a stone.

For a moment the silence contained you.

Then your body cracked open
On an anvil of pain.

You screamed defiance,
Screaming, screaming, screaming,
Nailed to the cross of your solitude.

The ward echoed to your screams.

No one seemed to hear your anguish.
The peremptory remarks of the nurses
Were as bayonets in the hands of soldiers.

Blood dripped into the plastic container
Held between your knees.

Somehow you survived,
A little less innocent,
A little less hopeful,
Seeking a blank consolation
In the stasis of empty spaces.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

December 14th. - 15th. 2010.