Voices of the ICU

Grab me with one hand and throw me

Across your doorway, let my hooks rattle,

Let my neat hem hide the suffering

Like a shared blindfold to all who pass,

Stitched so that pain may be private.

Let my creaseless self transform from sheet

To new love, guardian of your solitude,

Keeper of most vulnerable vulnerability,

Woven wall of moralistic thread,

Thou shall not share thy body with the world.

I am fabled, sharp and hollow,

Disposable, efficient, evil,

Wanting so to be inside you,

Wanting so to give you life.

Once our famous interlude:

You were bruised and I forgotten.

Look away. My life is over,

Heaped within a common grave.

Confusion is a piece of glass

Dividing space. Why bisect

Arbitrarily the clarity of a morning

Born whole and wanting to be one?

I cut the air like one-armed scissors,

No more concerned than a child clipping comics.

I am the blind eye through which you see.

If your future is an evil hand,

Then I am your guardian angel,

Lover of wrists and bedrails,

Giver of slack and restraint

And if mornings are shackled

In leather weeds and evenings suffer

The limitations of light in dusk,

You too will suffer my tease of slack.

Town crier to which nobody responds,

I have seen too many wolves in dreams:

Everywhere I look, a heart stops,

A breath stalls. Good news,

Even good news, is spoken so disturbingly

That even the mother could not love

The voice of this most colicky child.

I will track through your head

Travel to your bowels, provide suction

Or sustenance. It hurts

That you of all should hate me most,

Taped to your nostril. I want

So much for you and that you

might find within your stiffened heart

the kindness to recognise my utility.

If your mother is a stainless steel box,

Virgin eyes blank as gauges,

Passion parcelled as air and blown

From her lips into your own,

Then you will be cradled in hollow arms

Or buckled in this runaway buggy

Until you learn to toddle again,

Liberated from my terrible breast.

Your father's love has two upright beams

And a transom. Though my frame is huge,

There is absolute emptiness inside

Unless you fill my threshold. I offer

No more certainty on either side,

But my love is to release you to risk

And my sadness and joy is to lift your veil

Of illness, kiss you and give you away

Standing before the altar with the world.

• Copyright ©2004 by the American College of Physicians