The Ad Hoc Apocolypse

Tired, Impossibly tired surrounded by waiting. The damned clock on the impossibly blue wall, waiting to reach 2pm, then onward whirring dervish to 2.30pm, ever chasing that next complete number, soon it's 3pm. A profound silent exuberance, a gratuitous grinning tick-tock-tick-tock onward though, ever like a rabid tongue clapping slathering mongrel in the night, chasing its own time heavy tail. Madness, I think to myself, utter insanity, the doctor a sort of short important man in his kingdom, a grin belie those horrifying eyes, grin-glance-grin-glance, seems somehow to up the nurses and the dead patients into a trustful glance, I see the old lady who continuously asked me for the time, despite that damned booming clock, I see her hobble into a standing position, yet after eight failed attempts, the doctor grins at a nurse, she in turn glances at the crumbling enthusiasm that has become the ceaseless dry pile of raggedy fearlessness that was the old lady. The nurse reluctantly smiles and offers the ad hoc entity of brown and wonderfulness oddity with flowers a hand, some assistance possibly. As she reaches her knee fulcrum, the apex of crouched up rightness that becomes standard for the stinking dying, she turns to me. What did I do to this frail delirious zenith calamity.

-Excuse me young man, do you have the....

-Damn it strange wench, no, I do not have the time look on the wall, the wall, it is a bloody bass drum drumming out every minute of our gurgling sneezing sweating swelteringly dreadful waiting! Pleading of course inspires remorse in the elderly, best not to communicate at all. She nudges the transparent wavering nurse away, with some godly force hidden gladly deep within her madly awkward cardigan, my god where will we end? She resumes her eternal plastic foundation.

-This man is upset, can't anyone see he's upset, OOOooooOOh, dear, I'm sure it will be fine, I had nine, well eight if you don't count Thomas! Sighs so imperceptibly I could have wept myself into vaporous apologies for her.

Soon outside amongst the smokers in the arguing darkness of a maternity wards garden. Not people, surely over there in the faded playfulness of a tree, grumping and slurping the dregs of a tobacco based Moses basket. Shivering pretending not to know, to know anything, why ask a man who knows nothing! Solemn now, deeply worried, waiting, I count the smoking shadows, but it is a madman's endeavour, sometimes nine, then eleven, a couple leaving, a father arriving, then an ambulance driver sneaking his from behind a recycling bin, then only four not including myself, never myself. But soon every shadow is a twinkling fiery plume, and the sky as slipped awkwardly before me, a sheer sheet of horizontal universe, possibly made of water, a fisherman's window into the everything of a wondrous night time. You would never touch it, but if you dared then Jonah would be there, enormous fish hook fingers strangling the life out of a once pious pike, beating its breathless retreat into a paragraph Mark Twain wrote. The swoosh of an interrupting door, automatic swooshes, a wonderful device for those who have forgotten the mystery of handle. More leave more arrive, an endless tide of pipe pipers trailing a bizarre wraith of vapor to and throw, will never end, will the rats not cease dancing in this of all confused evenings?

Her grinning strained gallantry, not many words, breathing deeply, softly, then with a rapidity that is almost impossible to follow, beautiful really the forbidden strength of machine gun contractions, then an ill timed cease fire. I peer out of the dark window and it grins tiredly right back through me, gas shook the bed and she grins its soft cloud head high affect, so high now, peering into her own agony, before five more machine gun volleys, the great women approaches looks at the clock on the wall, this behemoth matriarch, jotting down figures I'll never understand, she says something comforting, more comforting than the moon drying outside, heavy showers all night, more comforting than tea, toast and bed when I was a child. Silly 'when I was a child' thinking now of my incredulous beginnings as I am about to begin all over again, a half consumed self pity, when I was beginning! I glance at the massive matriarch, I smile at the womb holder, breathing on all fours, sucking impossible amount of magic from a canister hidden in the wall, tough sweating pyjama's agony. I irritably scratch my sleepy forehead, desperate to do nothing, something helpful. But what can the drollest patriarch achieve when the Massive Matriarch and Womb Holder seem to be encrypting life itself from the pathetic seed of impregnation. I in my pointlessness, proudly think of Brunel, Kerouac, Kitchener and Newton, nothing oh sad lamentable nothing entities, compared to this clean tiled coven of female alchemy.

The womb, in that rests a child, infant really, a real flesh me, mine, or half at any rate. The X and Y of waiting, dreaming in that womb, sleeping possibly, awake surely, does she know? What mystical muscle pulsated the first insidious warning, a chattering muscle a million chattering muscles.

-Don't forget to breath on the outside!

-Clean behind the toes!

-Oh time, too soon is nine months.

-But I'd rather stay here, if that is okay with you!

-Oh no, the great Contraction did spoke, spoke that we must push, puuuuuuush, you into 'Out world'!

-Oh please stop talking, I am quite comfortable here, I shall probably have a doze.

Is that how it is? I wonder, or does the brain controls the entire business, some fat controller occasionally forgetting the time, premature, or late, or much too frequently, too sadly, how dreadfully painful, not at all. A birth so still Autumn's blustery copse makes not a single shiver, night or day. I panic in my loneliness amongst the Moses Basket Pied Pipers. After all manner of puzzling, I find myself still waiting.