79; 100; 99/52 (68); (6); (15) 19; 5.2
It’s you.
You’re wired up, tubed up – there’s a snorkel too far in.
There’s precision engineering; moisturiser.
‘If you were a sea creature…’
Mechanical syringes: adrenalin, protein.
On the monitor large soft numbers bubble next to their graph.
They’re colour coded. Green’s the heartbeat; light blue, breath.
This book of hours is electric, it’s a pumped-through aquarium,
it’s sampling the darkest zones of the sea.
It’s an earnest echo-sounder: muted illuminations pulse –
it’s your dynamic ledger of prayer, prayerless, probing higher (deeper)
to faintest life,
beyond all price (priced).
The whole ocean is endangered.
ART is red is blood pressure
and pressure again another soft light blue, the cavity round the heart.
Pressure, pressure, pressure – the tense yellow number
is the brain, its internal push.
You.
You have plastic components and ‘Sedation is titrated to body weight’ –
morphine’s here, as if voluptuous can be synthesised.
Mermaid You, Coral You, the Sea. You’re flotsammed, relic’d, unlike.
‘If you were a sea creature…’
You’re surfaced on a beached life-raft /
you’re tangled, subsea,
snagged in a rig, still too deep.
You’re the bellows, you’re the life support, power all:
the serenity of the machinery, the precision of the staff
(that caring distance is also yours),
your family’s on-hold grief.
All strive.
All strive to fathom this aimless curse, this intricate affront.
‘Watch the glass, not the sea.’
‘Watch the sea, not the glass.’
But the Sea is a secret to itself,
and the Sea would not be capable,
you would not be capable
of remembering your own death,
if you live through it.
Live through it.