When We Dead Deliver

'I doubt yesterday exists'
She looked very pale to me, but the doctor said it was perfectly normal. Yet she did look very pale to me. A sickly old gentleman laboured to open a window, suddenly a thrilling breeze wafted through the room; it was scented like damp hey. I remember once masturbating in the warm grass on holiday in Cumbria, Grasmere I remember being naked with my clothes in a pile beside me, an empty water bottle beside me in the endless fields. How the voyeur sky and sun aroused me and I masturbated in the long grass; what flowers spring forth there this day belong to me, I am the father of a field of flowers. The nurse returned with a basin of sloshing warm water and a thin white flannel cloth, the nurse was not pretty, she was stump and fat, like two ill shaped potatoes put atop of each other. She smiled and I felt lonely. She drew back the thick blue plastic privacy curtain and sat beside the emaciated half dead, the archetypal end of a life spent in the mundane, I glanced at the creature in the bed and I hated it, almost as if it were some viscous thing discovered in the damp recesses of a dark garage; I hated the creature and I felt lonely; the nurse gently dabbed the flannel upon the forehead of someone that knows me. The doctor mumbled something I did not catch, he played with his stethoscope with an air of detached interest, he had secretly longed to be an actor. Strict father who had yearned for men as a boy, our fathers make clowns of us, their listless lusts make enemies of our own lusts, and in turn we become listless fathers, hating our sons; yet so it is with the doctor, for his fathers, equally austere strict father made him marry his second cousin, very bland, not at all pretty yet a respectable Christian and now the vernal of that relationship stood beside me, sadly reciting Brecht in his own sullen mind; the doctor suddenly said he was very busy and could not stay any longer, he made his apologies and left, he had a very distinctive walk, it would have been absurd if he were not a man of status, he walked as if racing with an invisible foe that taunted him as it passed, soft shoes speaking upon the clean white floor, he retreated from the ill. He looked extremely distressed to see so many sick people, as if he was perplexed as to the nature of their business with him. I was once an orderly in this hospital, I would wake early, wash from a basin of cold night chilled water, dress eat the warm gruel mother made so sweet, I'd hobble sleepily from quiet streets into entombed corridors, creaky shoes, and a belly full of gruel and a heart full of grime.
'She looks pale today' said the nurse; she had a great bosom and a kindly face of a great healer, all her children would be saints. I was a ghoul, with a chalk circle for a heart and eyes of the turgid romance; I do not believe in Jehovah so there were no candles.
'Yes I was just saying that to the doctor, but he said she looks normal'
'Oh, (the nurse seemed to check her self mentally) well that is good!'
'No I think she looks very pale, much more so than yesterday'
'Yes but it is rainy today, no one likes the rain' She said as she comforted the figure of humming lost despair, a spectre in sweat saturated blue linen. I remember camping as a young man, north of Penrith, Cumbria. I remember being love and camping with the one I loved; I recalled how she dashed happily up a hill behind a tree to urinate, whilst I whistled and collected fire wood. I remember lighting a candle at night, and sleeping merrily, desiring to touch and make love to her in the cool dark under canvas of all the loves we cherish, I cherish you the most adoringly and bitterly ' I recall my youth and it belongs to some other person, if I could go back I should like to; I recall all manner of sad sensations and turn my face away to see the sick and unhappy mumble gladly at the grey huddles of disappointed family nibbling grapes and yearning at the wards large brown clock. The nurse can be heard humming some 'Waltzing Matilda' whilst she cleans the sick person. I recall a great deal of nothing and I feel lonely; time will pass and I let hours drain. I ache in my limbs, and the nurse has been and gone and returned again. A sudden moth belts about the high light bulb, I glance with interest. Soft amber fluttering of a candle wax butterfly, strange creature from night's spiritual lowest point and I watch it flutter. It is solemn to be alone amongst sad machines and endless queues. I walk to the window it has been closed now, I look outside the windows are always closed against windy odes that rasp upon the windowpanes. The slush of the dirty neon snow, trampled by a never ending parade of ambulances blue flashing and irksome to the sensitive ear, slush upon the highway, and dark vomit of consumer prerogative still stained the carpet less floor way back in the hovel of my nightmare. I fear that outside realm, and I no not a soul. Souls those cryptic charnel womb essences of some looser laughter broken apologies upon the faltering flaccid tongue of the broken man who desired only to hide and yet could not. I hear the nurse call my name softly, I watch the now dark sky and the now trampled snow, it must have snowed whilst I was waiting. People passing people with coloured bags of goodies and other things for other people nobody knows anybody anymore. That grey soggy vomit of the damned, seeping into the wood of the earth, eating it. Insatiable appetite as it oozes upon the good green grasses, then onward ever oozing deeper into the core, until the heart of something unknown is sobbing with dry smoky post inferno hysteria. I run my clammy hand through my brown grey hair, I loosen my tie and itch my palms, I shudder to know all those things I can't remember. The funeral cot draws me against my will, the bell chimes I must leave. She looks sleepy and sweats make her usually fine lustrous black hair stick to her forehead in knots and unsightly tangles, I gripped my own thin cold heart with self-possession. A great waning ephemeral strength unwise and spent, thawing from my nose and dripping upon the clean white tile floor - she squeezed, with frail insistence. She smiles; a doomed demanding venal love, eyes asking gleefully of me, I withdrew my hand, she murmured a dull echoing confusion, very alive now and shaking, inspecting my isolated floor eyed apparition more studiously yet still implausibly vague. Torn am I between stroking her damp cold cheek and fleeing into the shark tank, the neon bedlam where I too may ignore the people and buy pretty useless things. A febrile nausea gurgles gaily in my gullet, it may have been 'I love you mother' it may have been 'let me go foul hag' I should like to know but can not commit myself to telling. This is the hour when we abandon the precipice or plunge into the ghoulish gorge, how quarrelsome the sombre make us, and harsh criticisms turned to dead leafless branches inside my dry oesophagus, which is a word I learnt in a medical dictionary before leaving the dull tenement housing. I turned immediately, the grinning face of death behind me. I beat a quick unnoticed retreat along the mauve corridors of the insane, and out into the bare sanity of town rambling.