A Medic Shouts for Bandages

I do not remember anything,
This unknown damage seems to be,
Just existing, always there,
But with eyes forced shut,
And my arms strapped down,
I only sense my own nerves,

The place of my face and eyes,
Runs red or white or blue,
With liquids, undefined by me,
Maybe viscous, slow-flowing,
Perhaps something thinner, rarer,
Brain fluids seeping towards earth,

It smells calm like camping,
But what breathes for me,
Is some form of blank mystery,
This enriched air forcing itself,

Inside me like a rough kiss,
But all the time wet and dripping,
As remembered summer rain,
Close before the second psalm,

Something is a slight burn,
A warm trickle in all my vessels,
An army holding the line of pain,
In an uneasy truce on the perimeter,
Out there in murmuring lands,
Wild with auxiliaries,

In this strange confusion of flesh,
And wet earth about my face,
Something not me, is tugging,
In the space behind my eyes,
The place of Self in quiet thought,
The fragile light of consciousness,

I feel a hook, dragging at my mind,
Liquefying  the useless cortex,
Perhaps I am in line for Pharoah,
Mummified, debrained and dried,
To keep for purposes now lost,
Stood up each week as non-voting,

And though pain camps in the hills,
Around its fires and standards,
I'd seem to welcome a blankness,
The gradual removal of memory,
Painless, voided and defuelled,
A lasting life, unbothered,

But another sense is mended,
The previously unheard ring,
Of extended detonations,
Fills the world with new sounds,
A doctor, with nowt but verbs,
Calls for picks and swabs,

Her voice a strained shriek,
Penetrates the worst of it,
And gently calls my name,
Still present in my mind it seems,
Held in the dulled grey matter,
Evidently not her target,

The hook has pressed my eye,
And though shut, it sees lights,
Mathematical progressions
Of dancing squares and dots,
And I tense in the white cot,
A straggling of near-corpse,

Soiling the clean rooms,
Vague medical facilities,
Erected in haste, memorials,
To those who died in filth,

The pals, the regulars,
the mud angels and martyrs,
Of a war we thought we'd win,
When the world had hope,