In the badlands of the risk-assessed
medium-secure unit dining room cutlery
is a weapon threat.
It’s dangerous in them there hills: the Sheriff’s posse patrol the endless prairie of the ward, in pursuit of ‘Wanted’ cutlery.
They don’t want to be scalped in a patient raid, by sharps from the therapy kitchen.
Every mealtime is a death-defying standoff between boredom and hunger.
It’s staff versus the Cutlery Gang, who plot like ageing shootists in their locked drawer hideout.
These old-timers have the edge over us. They define true grit, their wits sharpened by years of wrestling hospital food.
We are just dude-ranch cowboys with our Spaghetti Western cardboard sandwiches.
High noon and it’s lunchtime.
Staff are on battle-stations, serving-spoons cocked, as gunslingers swagger to the dining queue.
Sometimes, shootouts occur; plates ricochet and we retreat behind the serving-hatch in a hail of pea-shrapnel.
Today, however, it’s a truce: the peace-pipe is a supervised vape in the town-jail yard.
But the natives are still restless, poised like marmots when vultures circle overhead.
The Sheriff is on high alert for suspicious E-Cig smoke signals: there’s still tea and supper to come.
Kate Meyer-Currey works in forensic mental health needs a dark sense of humour to survive. This poem is for her Old Timer patients, who can’t stand plastic cutlery (but still might use real metal to scalp the staff).