Cheap Martini

It's 12:30 at Sutton Royal Marsden, 

civil servants and NHS staff workers 

queue up for their daily feed 

even if they're not hungry, 

it's lunchtime, 

that means you've got to eat, right? 

you've got to stay committed 

if you want to qualify for obesity, 

everything here confuses me, 

there's all these people acting quietly,

clearly dying of a terminal sickness,

they seem somewhat resigned to the fact 

that their end-of-life care is like putting 

the correct waste into the designated recycling bins, 

some appear to ponder just how many sins 

they may have committed to end up with

a slow death so painful and miserable, 

as the clock hands turn, 

it's not simply counting down 

the minutes of someone's shift, 

it's counting down the minutes 

to the end of someone's life, 

and as I sit here waiting for my wife 

to come back from her CT scan, 

there's a poor man festering in the ward 

that will never leave this place alive,

he'll be bagged, tagged and put on ice,

to think a whole life lived 

ends in a hospital mortuary 

left like a cheap Martini that's been 

sitting on the bar from the night before 

that no one wanted to take ownership for