Intensive Care Bed Poem by Roger K.A. Allen

The last bed
Filled at midnight’s empty hour
The play in three tragic acts,
Moribund... humanity.
Bleep, bleep... bleep

Monitor marks time with impassivity
Failing heart’s fibrillating, syncopated requiem.
Actors white-stiff-starch coated
Green-draped sterility blood-stained,
furrowed brows,
sick smell of latex gloves on tale-white hands and sweat.
Clock’s falling hour the foe
And dawn's rays that lie beyond the east.
Shameless tubes and plastic probes
In fading flesh.
Fatigue plays a solo oboe song –
a fugue –
Blood’s slow red-brown ooze
In yet more plastic tubes.
Orange dawn
Pierces wounds in sorrow’s sombre sky,
The Universal tide runs low,
Life ebbs away. Ventilator alarms...
No bleep... bleep.
Love weeps –
And solemn sighs.
Last act, Chart’s last entry-
...’Bed One empty’.
Fresh clean sheets –
...the body gone not unlike that Easter morn –
the morning shift comes on.