Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002

_______________________________________________________________

Welcome to Your World

 

by

 

C. Jason Lee

 

Every week for nine months we spoke to you in a diary

Threaded from the finest purple silk

 

Prepared a cot for you

Owned by your Great still Great Aunty Olive

 

The wood way over one hundred years old

Small enough to be level with our bed

 

Your body and head had been everywhere

Deep within London’s womb

 

And from Glasgow to Florida

Up in the air paragliding

 

In meetings that lasted forever

In woods that one-day would not be

 

We spoke to you through the tum

You held my hand through skin

 

And I dreamt this went through

The membrane in the night

 

The second of August 2001

Let the panic commence….

 

Mr Robertson offers us an hour

To decide if you will arrive

 

Then shuts us in a padded room

Offers leafless tea to calm the storm

 

A nurse with cotton wool eyes

Demands that we know the facts

 

Removes us from reality

It was now or never

Or so they were singing

 

‘Make sure you’re back on time

I have an optician appointment

A surgeon needs his eyes’ says Robertson

 

Here’s to you Mr Robertston

The Devil loves you more than you will know

Woe woe woe woe woe woe

 

 

So we return bang on the dot

And wait forever and a day

 

No beautiful pea green boat

Or owl or pussycat or Jemima Puddle Duck

Where the wild things are and are not

 

In the evening we weep

And in the morning we arrive

 

On Maternity Ward M3 Sharoe Green

A woman snores the Mersey beat

 

I unpack your mother’s things

And then we’re off

 

Tugged through dark alleyways

Corridors full of those on the cusp

 

But first we enter the room

Where you spend your first five days

 

They order us to sit down

They hold back their humanity

 

A new religion based on machinery

Chairs broken and torn

From trying to cushion too much

 

The room a sight of war

Torn paper and corneas

 

A couple of hearts lying

Pumping chewed over the floor

 

Hole of lost horror of sight secret place

 

I pull one stool over for Dr Malmoud

But he ignores equality as a god must

As cool as a sterile surgical instrument

The white coats priestly garb

No stain too precious

 

A portable radiator in the corner

SGH sprayed in dripping red

As if someone had been cut up

Blood and guts cover the metal

 

 

 

View of cows and fields

People with their dogs

And another hospital

Where later that day you went

 

We have no time to think

Thought

Something human

Must give to machine

Just enough to hammer in

Emotion

To remove all of the

Spirit

 

Your mother shakes vacs as a jelly

The mould not already fixed

I grip her paw like a time bomb

Momentum of nuclear proportions

 

March down long concrete ventricles

Hospital an inhuman beast

 

Headscarf on blue top and bottom

Clogs that read RUDI and AJIT

 

All scrubbed up and ready

Now or never now or never more

 

While they anaesthetised mum

They get me looking at a painted beach

 

Just like when they did the scan

Men have to sit outside and read the sports pages

 

Burly sullen men hum

Watch the witch of a receptionist

Play with her fingernails

 

Young woman stomps up and down

Her nerves the rhythm of the vacuum

Registrar who we met the day before

Your lifetime ago

Insisted whatever we do

Must be ruled by her

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get into hospital

Laugh at you a little

Then a lot

 

A door that reads

‘Beware doors open towards you’

Perhaps myths say all of the truth

 

But air conditioning and clock whining

Tells the space that time insists

 

Off and on signs and blue chairs

With boxes of tissues and cupboards

 

Let us take stock entrance and exit

In a play not a film

 

Set not full enough

The crew too real

 

I can hear some noise in there

Sounds like laughter behind the doors

 

I chomp down on the scream

That bounces inside the echo belly

 

Until Margarite finally invites me in

To hold the mother’s hand

 

Her face an oxygen mask

A look of the most elaborate fear

 

The best day of your life

The first and the last

 

Beats of the monitor comforting

Dr Krishna a man of many talents

 

Tubes and dials and smiles

Beeps and scrapes and tugs

 

The most precious moment ever

Your life little baby, whose?

 

Do not pass go do not go there

Beyond the sterile marker

 

Do you want a look?

A head slivers from the slice

 

10.19 in the morning

Friday the 3rd of August

In the year 2001 AD

 

A body spine bent and a murmur

Purple and pretty and alive

 

Whisked to a metal tub

Plonked in and wiped

 

Thumbs up then tests

9 out of 10 then 10 out of 10

 

You wrapped up on your mum

Warmth of certain nature

 

Back to me and then in a tub

With a heater over the top

 

Then with me for twenty minutes

Staring up into my eyes

 

What did you want to know?

Apart from telling me everything

 

Me back in there thanking everyone

Getting undressed and upstairs

 

Looking at the inside of your head

With Malmoud and some gel

 

A baby in a boy band

Seen on the screen

 

Ill babies all about

In the bleak mid-Summer

 

Then later in the room we talk

You mumble the chants of sages

 

Your hidden ancestors alive

One sixteenth from the Punjab

 

Off to Preston Royal in a bus

They let me carry you now

 

Angela the nurse another gift of god

As if she had known you before birth

 

 

Through labyrinths to the room of truth

You strapped on a conveyor belt

 

Generation game

Cuddly toy

The machine a space capsule

That dropped through the roof

 

Pretends to read all our futures

Not knowing where you came from

 

And me confessing all to Angela

Like a monk in a hill top palace

 

Back to the ward and the feed

At three minutes past four

 

Next day Pam Cam and Amanda

I have given you a bath by then

 

On the Monday your grandma arrives

Then Tuesday home

 

On Wednesday down the docks

You asleep in the papoose

 

Grins from woman in the chandlery

The love of it the warmth of it

 

A baby is a babe magnet

So they tell me

 

Thursday to the registrar tears and cries

On Friday you prefer to take your time

 

Saturday you are here

You are here are you?

 

On Sunday you do your best

To let us know

 

Rewind we expect her at nine

Dr Ruth O’Connor all pale and greasy

 

A necrophiliac Satanist’s dream

Baby born plus or minus an anus

 

She arrives after mid-day her purple shirt alive

Tamed by a golden cross she worships death

 

And sketches your brain

On the back of a napkin

 

As if these are directions

To a drive thru McDonald’s

And they are

 

We have given up asking for the scan

She talks to me in a separate room

 

Of children I knew as a child

Ones who had certain ‘difficulties’

 

Even his own grandmother who works with them

Holds him now in a different manner

 

Every day they tell another tale

Relations demand the facts

 

As if there is comfort in science

True faith in the robot religion

 

Power in the hands of marble men

See the future in an electronic book

 

Back at home when asleep

I weep

 

When he cries all night

I wonder what I did wrong

 

People appear and inspect

Suppose seeing is believing

 

Spiritual wrapped in the visual

A motto for the warped

 

His Aunty on television

A visitor in Los Angeles

 

Mid-wife who talks non-stop

 

People scared of silence

Ought to be shot

 

People stomp on needle’s head

Pantheon of puppet dictators

With their blood of desire

Crisp with the molten remains

 

Time becomes immaterial

Races towards the finishing line

 

Gone berko with an egg and spoon

Ice-cream scoop somnambulist

 

Taking the shit home with you

 

Bombs kill the grey and green

A fat girl factually is the brainiest

 

They slice open a one-pound baby

And the Roman Muslim mother combusts

 

God a zebra crossing painted red

 

Nuclear and unclear the a priori

Only now the present exists

 

In a box of toys canteen of ill

Jack Lemon squeezing the juice

 

Someone gets closer to the adored

Chokes on the pips

 

Gift of God (Nathan)

The exalted one (Austin)

Meadow (Lee)

 

Hebrew Aramaic Greek Roman

Anglo Saxon Indian

 

Within whom there is no blame

As the silent fig tree

 

The silhouetting of the figure in the desert

Who bursts into flames of ice

 

Pores filled with the sand of history

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the box a shire-horse and a clown

Who plays ‘it’s a small word after all’

With Bagpuss and Pooh and friends

A long legged dog and psychedelic spider

His belly a mirror for the other actors

You curl up on my chest

A bundle of core love

And scream with Stalin’s rage

To be fed by a cold bottle

Yellow overflows through your nose

Like yesterday’s news in the gutter

 

Perhaps a separation of sheep and goats

Of gross denial and depth supply

 

The sifter of spuriousness

Paid not half as much

As a shape shifter of morals

 

Eight days old today eight days young

Internal symphonies and legacies

 

Triangular chin and round cheeks

Fingers to make the moon blink

 

A nose that knows some bounds

A pose of a squirrel rabbit cartoon

 

You face the sofa guarded by a toy dog

As if you will levitate

 

You mumble suck pant

Screech growl stretch

 

Cross your hands on your chest

The treasures we know are there

 

Rain has fallen clouds divided

 

Men on the radio love being English

Worship their lying humility

 

Is it true you poked your tongue out at me?

Gave me your truth

In time for a watery tea

 

Is it true I read you Santayana?

That Eli gave you a bath?

 

And so many loved you

And so many wanted you

 

The world came together

In your breath

 

What word is whispered in the wind?

 

DEFINITION

Hydrocephalus is an increase in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) volume,

usually resulting from impaired absorption,

rarely from excessive secretion.

 

CSF FORMATION AND ABSORPTION

CSF forms at a rate of 500ml/day (O.35 ml/min),

secreted predominantly by the choroids plexus of the lateral, third and fourth ventricles.

CSF flows in a caudal direction through the ventricular system and exits through the foramina of Luschka and Magendie into the subarachnoid space.

After passing through the tentorial hiatus and over the hemispheric convexity,

absorption occurs through the arachnoid granulations into the venous system.

 

CLASSIFICATION

‘Obstructive’ hydrocephalus’-

obstruction of CSF flow within the ventricular system.

 

PATHOLOGICAL EFFECTS

In the infant, prior to suture fusion, head expansion and massive ventricular dilation may occur, often leaving only a thin rim of cerebral ‘mantle’.

Untreated, death usually results,

but in many cases the hydrocephalus ‘arrests’;

although the ventricles remain dilated, intracranial pressure (ICP) returns to normal and CSF absorption appears to balance production.

When hydrocephalus arrests, normal development patterns resume, although pre-existing mental or physical damage may leave a permanent handicap.

In these patients, the rapid return of further pressure symptoms following a minor injury of infection suggests that the CSF dynamics remain in an unstable state.

 

Neurology and Neurosurgery Illustrated

by Lindsay/Bone/Callander  [Edinburgh, 1991]

 

 

 

 

Alder Hey Alder Hey Alder Hey Hey Hey

A rocking horse and a horse of rock

 

We drive up around and down ring roads

You surrounded by Piglet and a butterfly

An SHO thrusts a needle in your hand

Then crushes your fingers begging for blood

 

We are all sweating in there

And the nurse I hate is OK

 

I sit an hour with you

Listening to the other babies bleat

 

Nobody comes anywhere near them

Only when they are topped and tailed

 

All other babies are so small

You are too big for some

 

We saw your CT scan today

Puzzled over how doctors

 

Could mistake left for right

 

You hated it here at first

But now you sleep dare I say it

 

Like a little baby

 

Your mummy worries

That you won’t be the same

 

After the operation

 

I don’t know what I think

I’m not sure I have ever

 

Been that good at reality

 

I put a prayer on the chapel board

‘Please pray the surgeon’s hands are guided by God and

Nathaniel makes a full recovery’

 

No more no less

 

 

 

 

 

Down to the Magnetic Resonance Imaging

A baby shaped grey foam coffin

Yellow headphones and grey foam

Purrs within the plastic womb

Make sure all metal in the safe

Before your scan you must remove

Any metal objects such as watches

Jewellery, hearing aids, glasses,

Coins from your pockets, credit

Cards or hairgrips

 

Mr. Mole tells of a very large magnet

Large enough to surround your whole body

Radio waves and a computer

 

A pneumatic drill you inside a crown of plastic

Hallowed Philips’ halo

 

Will tell of the fluid that has lingered

You hold my thumb suck madly on a dummy

 

Only the lack of noise white corridor jungle beat

Causes you to move so you do exactly as you must

 

Then the man in a suit

Tells us how complex it all is

 

The difficulty the risk fatality percentages

 

Your mother cries and so do you

So a caring registrar

We forget his name

Picks you up passes you to me

As none of the nurses take any notice

And the pictures on the inside of part of you

Light up the wall

 

Art of science, science of art

 

Think of the nurses think of the nurses

 

We have milk for you and drugs for you

In all their forms

Now you sleep

As children around you yell

Their empty bellies to the heavens

 

 

 

 

So many smokers with children in callipers

The three corridors of murals of Bigphutt et al

A baby Wookie with a bow in her hair

Carrying a little dolly through the snow

Then there’s Hey Diddle Diddle

Jack and the Bean Stalk

Every fairy tale and legend

Flying horses and real tigers

All anthropomorphised

More real than medicine

Less imagined than God

 

Am I suspicious of scanners

Or of Scousers or are they of me?

They are creatures of aggression

In the way they speak

 

But their hearts go on forever

Like the tunnel

 

In my romantic illusions

Nurse Julie in the end the One

 

Colette eventually calming down

It was all too beautiful to imagine

 

Outside a kid is now yelling

Like a police car in a crash

 

Super Tramp on the radio

Your operation is tomorrow

 

The Feast of the Assumption

When Mary flew up to heaven

What do we always assume?

 

The best the worst or nothing

 

Insert an instrument to open it all

Let the fluid flow as it should

 

The man in the suit with the Rolex watch

Claims to have done 200 of these

Some as complex as yours

Some not so

But this has nothing to do

 

With function

With function

With function

A brain scan not relating to the being

To the past the present or the future

 

Your mum takes it all in

While I try to comfort you

The million pictures that illustrate

The pressure from the problem

 

And there on the wall in the chapel

Is a prayer for you for Wednesday

 

There are plenty of hard bodies

Plus bald headed men with hair down

Is it a holiday camp?

Run by Ronald McDonald

A house named after him

The king of the ill

 

Pre-teens with cigarettes

Women in white jeans

Green and yellow ambulances

 

White and red roses

A pocket full of…

Cardiac outpatients haematology ontology

 

There is a number on your wrist

And a number on your cot

But all is surrounded by smoke

 

AMBIWLANS

Ymddiriedolaeth gig gwasanaethau

Ambiwlans Cymru

 

Out of which comes a baby in all

Its finery of a plastic intensive care cot

Like the one you will be in

Maybe opposite this new arrival

After the hole is made in your head

 

There’s a cloud that looks like a think bubble

And in the tree is a wind chime

A fraction of something that could be hope

And happiness

…trickles down my spine

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know what I see

When I look at healthy babies

But I remember the game

We played when the question was

What profession did people have?

As they walked into the hospital

How high up the ladder were they?

Did they live with Jack or up the Bean Stalk?

 

And the color of the beams outside the hospital

Yellow blue green red

Have changed the language and who we are

Reminding me of McDonald’s

 

By eating the burger and the fry

Do they keep you alive?

 

Who takes a holiday on death row?

 

And I have seldom seen so many:

Women with tattoos

Little sea horses

Men with dyed hair like Elvis

‘To be honest’ the loudest

And the cheapest

Catchphrase

 

‘Are you numb from the neck up?’

Shouts a builder at a brother

As parts of the hospital roof fly off

Near to where I feed you outside outpatients

On a bright summers day every care in the world

 

Women come along and smile at me

A big dad with a big lad

Whilst men ignore responsibility

Responsibly

 

The more staff the less care

Urine outputs and respirations

 

And all the women sound like Lilly Savage

On fifty fags a day except they’re on sixty

 

At the moment there are eight doctors

And four nurses on the ward

And four babies

 

 

The phone is ringing

But like the cries of the babies

 

No one answers it

 

Turn on the answer phone

Please leave a message

In the bed pan

 

A crew of doctors most new

With the air of Edinburgh about them

Come around and around and around

Not even knowing he has had a scan

That today is the day of the op

No one had written it down

 

Dr Billingham came to see you yesterday

She asked your weight and date of birth

If either mum or me had had anything adverse

 

Today is the day

The day that today is

The fifteenth of August

You have been sleeping in my bed

And you are more alert than ever

Up all night

But not really

 

Because I nod off when you are fed

Then I awake when you scream again

So you seem to me

To be screaming all night

 

I get up at first light

Put you over my shoulder

And whack hard

 

You hang there

As if you have done so

Forever

 

Upstairs on the walls are Dalmatians

Mobiles hang from the ceiling

 

Black and white stripes on animals

Orange blue and green geometrical shapes

 

 

 

 

This is the neo-natal surgical unit

Theatre is next door and downstairs

Our room where you’ve been till now

Is underneath

And underneath that

 

The corridors the ventricles of the hospital

That lead to the chapel and restaurant

 

To the outside world that must exist?

 

There’s a dark wood rocking horse

With a long mane at the end of the ward

Winnie the Pooh splattered like hunny everywhere

 

A shiny orange floor that’s cleaned every second

The cleaners admired you last night

When I took you out in the hospital pram

 

Behind each cot is a Pooh bear

With name DOB and gestation Dr and named nurse

I changed the spelling on yours today

They put Nathanial not Nathaniel or Nathanyael

Honest to God the gaoler

 

In the chapel two fake plants guard the door

They water themselves from Christ’s side

With a wooden altar in the centre

What is it with the wood

 

Children’s Bible open on the lectern

And one on the altar and behind

 

So the sick may read of the miracles

From two thousand years ago

 

An enormous stain glass window

A white dove at the top the Holy Ghost

 

And a rainbow above three children

Who sit on a green hill playing

 

With a rocking horse and flowers

Their faces empty they are all of us

 

One is dark skinned in an army jumper

And bright blue trousers and standing up

 

While a girl in a violet dress kneels next to a boy

In a tidy yellow jumper at peace with the world

 

Two rows of blue chairs face each other

An egg oval of chairs that surround the altar

 

In a corner a battered piano in another an enormous candle

In another a grand organ are representatives here

Of Protestant and Catholic faiths

And one for the Welsh

 

Next to the cliché door is a fire extinguisher

Just in case of tongues of fire

 

I see Jesus with you

His hands on you

 

He heals you now and forever

Your eye glimmers through his palm

 

Lashes that caress your palms

That tell you that you’re made of flesh

 

Your hands over his face

As you swap your crowns

 

Back in the ward TVs everywhere

‘You should not be feeding him now’

 

‘Oh sorry it’s not eleven o’clock’

‘No it is ten’

 

Do not carry your baby at any time

Put in the cot or pram at all times

 

‘You may trip’

 

God be with you and you and you

 

I look around

See the posters for Aperts Syndrome

 

Charities that make me wonder what if

…I am your father

But that is meaningless

All questions directed at the mother

 

The nurses speak in their code

To assert their power

 

We have just put you into a baby grow

Lime green not surgical green

You were wearing a fancy Mon Doudou wrap

With your little legs kicking

And your knees knocking

To the rhythm of the ward

 

But Colette told us to change you

Even though there is a poster up

Saying you can wear what we want

And they are going to strip you off

And wipe you down in the theatre anyway

You are in the hands of the thespians

 

‘Where is his hat, he needs a hat’

 

You have gone up so much in weight

But I don’t trust the electronic scales

They differ from the other ones

Now 3.96 kg 8 lb 11

 

So many things are beyond belief

 

Dieticians enter the ward

To look at the babies fed via IV

 

The nurses argue for half an hour

Over calculations concerning

How much a baby has had

 

Is it over 20 or 24 hours?

They forgot to right it down

 

Not long to go now

They have brought your op forward

 

12.30 looks like kick off time

It only takes half an hour

 

To delve into your tabula rasa

Touch upon your past lives

 

But you will be down there for two

Preparation delving stitching

 

Cot number 22861

Donated on behalf of Blue Peter 1999

 

For the Bliss Appeal

A gel mat temperature 33.0-33.3

 

I ring Pam your gran

She rushes down the church

 

All this waiting

You are supposed to be in there now

It’s two o’clock what’s going on?

We stare at the security monitor

Where they will appear to take you to theatre

 

A bright light shines at the end of the corridor

The mother your mother Rebecca

Tells you to not walk into the light

She’s telling you about all the people

You are going to meet in London

Once you are over all this

 

No one appears in the corridor yet

 

The veins on your head stand out today

A big blue spider a map of blood

All the connections of the underground

Your eyes today bigger

Than the earth

 

Carriage casts shadow on the moon

                                    Soup dragons take their seats

The creaking chariot wheels’ tune

                                    Quenching lost bovine bleats.

Then journeying through tired stars

                                    To take lost spirits home

Ghosts from a billion wrecked cars

                                    Juggling monkey bone.

 

In orbit with the junk of race

                                    A Russian blinks an eye

Remembering his child’s lost face

                                    To crawl or walk or try.

And after the pushchair a fish

                                    Fins flap around the globe

A tribe carried in Jonah’s dish

                                    Missing child’s kingly robe.

 

People stomp in

Are they coming for you?

 

Our hearts on edge

A man takes away the dirty laundry

 

Black green blue files

Contain the histories of all these babies

That bleat forever but nobody comes

Perhaps Julie had a point

The first nurse at Alder Hey

Talking about cats and how much they sleep

She said things about reality

Is the dream the reality?

Have we been in a dream since August the 2nd?

 

You are still in theatre

Front row surrounded by Masks

 

We both go into the anaesthetic room

At first being told only one can go

 

They hand you to me to kiss

And I think they are handing you to me

To take into the theatre

And my heart drops into the yellow bin

 

Wheeled down by Kevin and a bald guy

Kevin said how beautiful you are

I said he spoke the truth to be honest

 

I’ve just jot the call at 4.40pm that you’re out

Up and they say half an hour to go

 

Both of us thought that you might not come back

 

And a guy from the Head with a little girl

In the next bed with a blocked intestine collapsed lung

 

And there you are with a yellow face

Wheeled by us and we’re there with you

 

Out of the parents’ room by your side

Holding your hand

 

Mummy goes to express milk for later

Gucci Mallucci arrives and states it went incredible well

That it was better than expected

Yet there were not one not two but

Three cysts straight through

And all the internal structures there

 

Three weeks and we’ll see

It went well praise

The God of disguises

 

And now you’re holding mum’s finger

And she’s humming to you

 

And Radio Caroline’s blaring

It is 6.30 and the nurses are jolly

 

They’re watching Gladiator

And that’s it for now

Off with his head

 

Messages from Amanda and Babette

Phone calls from Grandma Graham and Pam

 

Little comments from all

Father Sean and Mother Mary

 

I want more babies

Not that your are not entirely lovely

 

Just I want more of this love

Describe the change from heaven to hell

And back again

 

The change in the emotions

The storm outside

 

The clap of thunder that shook the house

 

Kids on the doorstep

Totally bald and young girls

 

Twelve year olds with belly button rings

And their own children and twenty fags

 

The kid in the smoking room

With a mashed potato face

With ketchup shoved in

 

And the sad room itself with trays for fags

Tin foil chicken chowmein leftovers

 

Around each corner another monster

 

In each cupboard of haematology and oncology

Another remembered please forget nightmare

 

Day one after op

Your face now swollen up

 

A shift in the fluid plus the anaesthetic

You’ve been vomiting too

 

 

We’re worried about you beyond belief

Even after Gucci said things were good

 

I don’t recognise you

 

Wanted to go to the chapel

But Sean’s door is open

 

I mind myself acting the part

The night staff fantastic

 

Especially Carol Oh Carol

Amazing hands that rub you

 

She manages to feed you

So you keep it all down

 

Said you mooched a bit in the night

We agreed comparisons between babies were bad

 

Churchill did not speak till he was 7

I trust her and she tells me to go to bed

 

Your mum’s been with you

Since five thirty this morning

 

She fell asleep across two chairs next to your cot

You’ve still got the little splint on your arm

To stop you knocking your drip

And you have been lively today

Watching the doggy dance

 

And I should not have left you for a minute

They’ve stuffed you full of Paracetemol

And you look like someone different

A fat faced baby and your still twitching

You quiver without a shirt on

 

But really this is just the fluid

That goes down from you brain

And into your lymph

 

No one tells us what is really going on

And there’s no point thinking of the future

I’m a shattered mirror

 

A doctors says you are looking good

A nurse says bad but you are good looking

 

 

Vomit flies from you hurled into space

You are awake and lively

 

You are asleep

 

They do the second MRI

After I have had a pep talk

 

During the ward round the doctors ask stuff

 

I am silent

 

Then one kneels down and asks me what the matter is

And I kick off about all the mistakes

 

In Preston they said it was the other side

Doctors not knowing their left and right

 

Then they did not write anything in the notes

They don’t know when the other scan is

 

A huge cock up without metaphors only semaphore

 

Of course worry and stress

But we generally hold it in

 

The mid-wife tells your mum

‘Have a good cry’

 

A nurse told her about her son

Born minus a hand

He had one on the scan

But it must have got caught up

 

And then it withered away

 

There is a child without an anus

A head smaller than your fist

With more hair than an anemone

 

Dr Mike Singh do you know anything?

You know about television

 

And the Six Million dollar man

We can rebuild him

 

Today Mal Gu comes

To look at the latest

You are the greatest

Nathaniel

How many nappies how many feeds

How many tears how many needs

 

How many dodgy lines

Before the truth is told

 

How many broken lies

Until the souls are old

 

The physical resurrection of the body

No more no less

 

Maybe I should keep quiet

But I wonder whether

Anything would happen

 

The surgeon on the ward round

Tells me that this is a corporation

And corporations make you wait

‘I don’t know what you do for a living

The way of the world

That that’s the best way

Don’t rock the system’

 

I still think I’m going to wake up

 

The business is business talk

Is something out of Kafka

The Castle maybe not The Trial

 

He tells me that at dinner parties

He does not mention he is a doctor

As this gets people going

 

We sit and wait all day

For two minutes with Mallucci

 

The thirty-two or more pictures of your brain

Symbols of the future the drain is beginning to work

 

You are on the mend possiblemente

But the nurses are worried

 

Wonder whether they should keep your cot

And our room downstairs

 

The baby next to you

Must stay three more weeks

 

 

Shunts are going in all over the place

One-inch long silicon in the head

 

That drains the fluid into the gut or heart

As people mutter quietly in Welsh

 

But, as Mal says, a shunt is for life

And we want you around for Christmas

 

‘If he has one shunt it’s a success

If he doesn’t need any

Crack open the champagne

30-40% chance of seizures

Shunts fail 60% of the time

And quite often the hole opened

By the surgery blocks again’

 

But we have seen the base of the brain

Recovering and the two sides come together

 

And your antipodean ancestor has it all

 

So we take you home

And hope you don’t turn blue on the outside

 

And we don’t on the inside

 

Watch to see if your eyes roll back

Or if you quiver without ceasing

 

But instead you cry relentlessly all night

And create arguments by your mumbles

 

The silver light by your cot

The Moses basket inclined to part the Red Sea

 

While on another planet a baby lacks fluid

An absent parchment blank page of dead religion

 

Yesterday you were two weeks old

Tomorrow I am 32 years old

Your surgeon granddad 62 

 

Your face looks less puffy

You like to curl up on my chest

 

Today you love your bath

Frog legs like a champ

 

 

You do good burps

Little lovekin face large hazel eyes

The mirror memory of blue

The twinkle in a monkey’s eye

 

Perhaps no one can predict the future

With a pack of cards or scanning the pictures

 

But all is already carved in light

What color will anything be tomorrow?[1]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



[1] Nathaniel had a repeat operation in mid-October 2001; so far so good (February 2002).