USED to be my playground, I’d travel
its underground veins in heels sharp as needles
theatres were for musicals not surgical procedures
holding hands on night buses, not bracing for injections
now I measure this city in hospital specimens
their car parks, canteens and appointment letters
Kings College Hospital—
where they noticed the hole in your fetal heart
The Portland—
where they gifted your stomach a feeding tube
St George’s, Tooting—
where they kindly descended your testes
Great Ormond Street—
where they stuck electrodes to your tiny head
where you swallow a breakfast of barium
and I’m weighed down by the protective tabard
where you fill the basement archives
with X-rays of your scarred lungs, snapshots
of clefts in your retinas, grainy video
of your uncoordinated swallow
where you are documented in pages and pages
of notes and letters in blue files and
hand scribbled drawings, those ink smudged
diagrams I pretend to understand
there would have been other kisses
in this city, in clubs and wine bars,
on rainy pavements beside red phone boxes
but the only ones I remember now
are those I place on your unconscious
forehead before the anaesthetist ushers
me out through double doors in the hospitals
of this city
