Resuscitate Me! (Katie Walters X Ace Ambrose)

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Ace Ambrose

11:16

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These days I only go out at night
I breathe in deep, to feel the cold air sharp in my chest
Fear twitching in my fingertips
Shake off the stress 
And I run
I run the way you only can with wheels
When I close my fists I wrap my knuckles in my wrist braces
My palm heels reinforced with steel
Head down, shoulders back
Downhill
For a moment I am weightless. I am infinite
At the crest of the hill a fox flashes across the road
Bright orange and bold, she is vermin
If I were to catch her, I would be legally obliged to kill her
Humanely, of course
She is searching for food
Tracing the echo of the woods that used to grow here
She is a bandy-legged wily survivor
Ready to tear apart binbags to satiate her hunger
She has teeth
And she is not afraid to use them
These days when I run I'm running from something
Shapeless and smelling of formaldehyde
I don't know what I fear more, the plague or the doctors
But the trick is to never let them catch you
Bite whenever someone touches you
Snarl whenever they get near
Hackles up and ugly

We will not be denied, hey
We are alive, we are alive
We will not be denied, no
We are alive, we are alive

When I sleep, I dream of being old
White haired and wizened
My face grown as ancient as my bones
My clinical frailty score disqualifies me from ICU admission 
And I am only twenty two years old
On the news they say not to panic
The people at risk have underlying conditions
And what I hear is that people like me aren't worth panicking for
I promise you that death is not an underlying condition
A dead cripple is no less dead than anybody else dead
Nobody says it out loud, but everyone knows
That when doctors choose who to save, they also choose who to not save
This is uncontroversial for as long as *you* remain saveable
The newspapers will describe these as tough decisions
Decisions nobody should ever have to make
That we are making anyway
And it scares me that all of the dead look the same
They call this pragmatics
But ICUgenics
But when you live as a cripple you learn to breathe in death
The line between living and dying is blurred
Cause both living and dying are verbs 
And you can't do the first without barrelling towards the second
If it's always at your back, then why not wear it
Like a leather jacket, like your torn up jeans
Like a middle finger
Why not bear every scar as your armour
Hospital gowns as battle jackets
With our backhands bruised by cannulas
And tangled in cheap white bedsheets
I have tasted concrete on the backs of my teeth
What we know now is nothing other than what we have always known
This is the curse we carry under our fingernails
It is the truth that we keep clenched in our fists
We've heard the words that people think they aren't speaking
That our worth is less 
And our breath reminds you of your death
And our bodies are a barely spoken threat
We know our place, it is impossible to forget
We have always been the lives that you keep hidden in the dark
We've been forced into poverty
For the sake of austerity
Forced out of our houses and
Warehoused in care homes
Dying of sepsis, from neglected infections
We've been sick and scared and uncared for
For a hell of a lot longer than this
The only difference now is that it's harder to deny
That people have stopped feeling embarrassed about it
And started asking us to fill out DNRs

We will not be denied, hey
We are alive, we are alive
We will not be denied, no
We are alive, we are alive

I will tell you right now that I am not going to beg for my life
This is not an appeal for sympathy
This is a battle cry
These words are not for you
They are fury and life
White knuckled
Kicking and screaming
My poetry says f*ck you
Everything we have has come from blood
From anger and pride
From dying messy and ugly 
And crawling tooth and nail up the steps of the capitol building
Asking nicely won't get you shit
If I am vermin, I will wear that label for as long as it remains true
I will not flinch from it
I will reserve my worth for people who don't ask for it
I will keep my softness for my crippled siblings
We will toughen up our outsides to keep our insides gentle
When you can't breathe, I will be your lungs
I will dig my fingers under my skin
Draw blood to lend my strength to you
I will remember the faces of my siblings 
Whose lungs got torn out to free up ventilators
Whose breath was fed to 
Bodies less ugly and flawed and beautiful
And I will call this injustice
Because f*ck their consensus
Because medical ethics aren't written by cripples
And my ethics don't accept these preventable deaths as inevitable
We are just as worthy of life
Ventilate us
In all of our fucked up glory
All our misshapen, muscle-wasted, migraine-heavy glory
With our subluxing hips, misfiring synapses, snapping tendons
Ventilate us
Unemployed and undesirable, bread line benefit dependents
Ventilate us invalids, unfortunates and dissidents
Teeth gritting, sharp-tongued, survivors 
Let us fight, we have been fighting our whole lives
Sometimes I feel so sick and so tired and sometimes I want to give up
I think maybe I'm not worth fighting for
But I have to stay angry or nothing will change
Pity won't save lives, but fury might
I mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living
I will tear open binbags with my teeth to feed my family
And will make myself so ugly, that people can't stand to look at me 
Hackles up, let them look at me anyway
I will bite whenever someone touches me
Snarl whenever they get near
And if they catch me
I will die loudly 
Die publicly, die ugly
Die humanely, of course

We will not be denied
We are alive, we are alive
We will not be denied
We are alive, we are alive

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