In Hospital - VII - Vigil

Lived on one's back,     In the long hours of repose,     Life is a practical nightmare -     Hideous asleep or awake.     Shoulders and loins     Ache - - -!     Ache, and the mattress,     Run into boulders and hummocks,     Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes -     Tumbling, importunate, daft -     Ramble and roll, and the gas,     Screwed to its lowermost,     An inevitable atom of light,     Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper     Snores me to hate and despair.     All the old time     Surges malignant before me;     Old voices, old kisses, old songs     Blossom derisive about me;     While the new days     Pass me in endless procession:     A pageant of shadows     Silently, leeringly wending     On . . . and still on . . . still on!     Far in the stillness a cat     Languishes loudly.    A cinder     Falls, and the shadows     Lurch to the leap of the flame.    The next man to me     Turns with a moan; and the snorer,     The drug like a rope at his throat,     Gasps, gurgles, snorts himself free, as the night-nurse,     Noiseless and strange,     Her bull's eye half-lanterned in apron,     (Whispering me, 'Are ye no sleepin' yet?'),     Passes, list-slippered and peering,     Round . . . and is gone.     Sleep comes at last -     Sleep full of dreams and misgivings -     Broken with brutal and sordid     Voices and sounds that impose on me,     Ere I can wake to it,     The unnatural, intolerable day.