Spring

The mad ones arrive, banging and trembling. They enter a room full of other old people who watch them from the cover of TV dinners. The new-comers x-ray, bypassing the corsetry, the stays, the pumps, the braces that hold in and up. The mad ones cut loose the hair nets and free fall.

You can hear one man — fifty or so and shabby — crying.
It is extraordinary to hear a man crying like this — ranging and ceaseless. There is no-one to approach it, to measure (up to) it.

They sound from inside fierce pattern.
One beats a tin plate
one rolls a head
one crinkles herself up like foil.
They are tuning their pain before the orchestration.
When I was a child with earache I did this; droning, and flexing my toes under the sheet to find the pulse and enter it. Only in making it so large was it diminished.