Waiting Room

~

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