St Andrew's Hospital, 1964

Perhaps there was some kind of cosmic, unsympathetic karma

at work, balancing the scales and then some more,

when "Bosie's" only, mad, childless son

ended up incarcerated for thirty-seven years,

the sins of the father and the grandfather amply

laid upon his schizophrenic back, and

I wonder whether in the end the younger orderlies

any longer bothered to say "Lord" or "Sir"

to the madman who was there before they were born,

in the former General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper Classes,

a place for genteel madness, separate from

the common people, the descendants of bad blood.

25.04.2013