At the needle exchange

[Magpie]

Hi mark,
Just wanted to say how much I like the premise and tone of this one.  i think you have done a good job with offsetting the humorous twist of the pov against the underlying seriousness of the  illness.
i particularly like the way that you have blended the medical images and terms / names with the slag names to give a picture of a place where clinical / meets  civilian/ meets street life

The last stanza sealed the deal for me in terms of the whole working for me.
My only nit was I did not really get the need for the question marks and then the opener I ask - felt like this should be past tense I asked.  (as I read the previous stanza as in [you gave me]  Steri-wipes, ci-tric, fil-ters ...  [so that in my read the end punctuation was ??? or even !!!]
sorry making a hash of explaining my thoughts here.  (long day yesterday and up early to finish a large concreting job...talking of which gtg and float my concrete !!)

AJ.

Hi AJ,

Thanks for the read and the comments. I'm not entirely sure if I've managed to convey the whole of what I was actually meaning. The 'Steri-wipes? ci-tric? fil-ters?' section were actual questions that they were asking, and the reply was a way of answering no to each of them. Perhaps if that next line was 'I ask for just pins and sin bins', with the inclusion of 'just' possibly clearing things up.
I've been holding off replying to you all day because for some reason I had it in my head that the only way to reply would be to explain the whole thing, but because I was hoping someone else may comment I didn't want to prejudice their view. But just now reading your comment made more sense to me and I realised I could reply without influencing other thoughts. It must of been my tiredness earlier on that clouded my thinking.
Thanks for the comments and thoughts hopefully I can make more sense of this poem later on.

It's good to see you coming back and writing more poetry again.   

Mark