Displayed in Chelsea

How nice for the dwellers of Chelsea,

For the tourists who visit in droves

To spot the odd hospital escapee

Whose aura of otherness behoves

 

The healthy, the fit and the smoking

To tread SW3 with more care,

To steer round the tube-up-nose bloke in

Luke’s Gardens; the dame without her hair.

 

They’ve got used to the man on the drip,

Machine shunted across Fulham Road

Where he chills at the café and sips

On coffee and sunshine – unloads

 

That husk, ward-dried sense of himself.

Or they might just see me – and my pump

And bandage and cannula.  Health

Can implode with that very first lump.

 

 

Written at The Royal Marsden Hospital, Chelsea