I'll never understand people who have never been sick a day in their life, they must have glowing orange halos over them at night, as this sick-room is more like the eternal dark of a lonely prison cell, the filtered light of the blinds the only light we see, keyhole silhouettes and shadow-walking vampires scraping their curled toes across the smooth, wooden floor.
A lemon-kiss and morphine, and still the flat and dull ache of severe pain, as I wish I were made of graveyard stone, they don't feel anything, no heart, no pulse, no flesh, no nervous and orderly eyes on you like you're some kind of frail test subject in an asylum of overt madness and violence, a wild tangle and knot of strangle-vines and almost loveless like the poetic shoreline of the gray Baltic waves, half-frozen in a dystopian icy slumber and lover's embrace, how I counted the letters in the aftercare instructions while I waited on my prescriptions to be filled, there were exactly one hundred and fifty of them, it must be important, as I must look like a bunch of tired funeral sticks in a burlap kindling sack, brittle and exhausted, I am able to walk about 10 feet before collapsing.
Being in the hospital is worse than the sick-room, I like my pale yellow walls, the hospital is like being thirsty and tasting dead water, the endless off-white corridors and bright, fluorescent-lit hallways dotted with artful mosaics of devilish leopards and abstract tiger lilies suspended high above the silver clouds of a living puzzle, the whirring sounds of fresh emergencies and delirium, I hadn't eaten in four days, the painful whine of generically numbered wheelchairs and rolling trauma beds, the video game beeping sounds of an ultrasound, the warm gel soothing, and I'm scared, my red heart ready to burst, a profound quiet and soft grace killing the bright sunlight outside, a blushing and bruised rose-pink brush painting us all in an overwhelming portrait of sadness and unbearable melancholy.