Post-Operative

This is the slow consciousness.
The artificial sleep is lifted,
A heavy guard from dulled veins.
White on the while walls,
White light in the land of wakening,
A dreamy purgatory where
I cannot think, feel, sleep.
I can only exist, inside my head,
And feel with these closed eyes for pain
I feel it from far off, distant,
It inhabits another body.
Mine, still riddled with the numbing anaesthetic.

But they have done it.
I feel it now, the wound-edge
The black hole of the incision.

Then a halting flex of metal as the wheels
Are shocked into life, cracking through the unreal sleep.
They are taking me back, back to the ward
And back to the living land of pain.