- Anon.
Germany
Category: Anthology (Page 6 of 11)
I am in the centre of nothing.
Nothing cushions me.
Nothing protects me
I am comfortable surrounded by nothing
Nothing is nice and kind and gentle.
I am nobody in nothing
I am special in nothing
Nothing matters in nothing
Nothing is everything
I am nothing
Nothing touches me
I touch nothing
Nothing moves me
I move nothing
Nothing loves me
I love nothing
Nothing is good
Nothing is great
Nothing is better than me
- by Una Sombra
UK
A rookery, long abandoned now,
had been built inside my body.
I don’t know where the birds went
or why, one day, they uninhabited,
leaving only their barbed-wire
residues, strung across the boughs
of my hips; all sticks and spit,
all hollows meant for holding
something small, still desperately
alive. I’m sorry – I’m afraid
I know only my own dark canopy,
its filtering bones of light.
- by Roseanne Watt
UK
I flirt with my itch.
By turns it niggles, seduces, pesters;
as it gapes, festers,
I reach down,
don’t dare to look,
rip legs to shreds with nails, shorn short
(but not short enough);
viscous red
smeared across my calf,
warm to touch.
I suppurate for art;
as if sawed in half,
shriek a pain.
I climax;
vow to abstain
in future;
fail.
- by Isabel White
United Kingdom
The television I bought five years ago
sits in the corner of my room.
It helped me through those morphine nights
where my lung drain, like a sick umbilical cord
snagged from my side.
I would watch Countdown at 3 a.m., clasping
the puppetry of sign language like a charm.
- by Jacqueline Woods
UK
It wouldn’t be fair to say the ache starts
every morning as I wake.
Or truthfully that I wake at all,
more I become conscious… of the pain.
The fire started small and young.
Fickle flickering up my spine.
Across my shoulders like a seasoned log,
spreading further, faster as I age.
It took hold.
It ravaged me, left me weak and wincing.
Scared to stretch my body,
as if it would elongate my pain.
The ache doesn’t care how I adjust.
Turn this hip, rest this hand, lift this leg.
To chase it out of one limb just moves it,
across the map of my body.
It doesn’t listen to the pills.
Signals sent to block it in my brain.
It weaves its way round them,
conniving and wheedling itself into my synapses.
- by Kitty Frilling
Author website: www.kittyfrilling.co.uk
United Kingdom
When he was dying, I swallowed a CoCodamol before bedtime as if it were hot chocolate. I craftily attributed my zen-like calm in the face of helping Dad as he pissed blood into a plastic pot at 3am – I don’t know what’s happening to me, he said, again and again – to my sensible study of The Tibetan Book of The Dead. It was a lie, but a lie that helped.
- by Libby R.
Author website: The Diary I Didn’t Write
U.K.
Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can
Then you’re ill
can’t work
can’t walk
can’t bear talk
or remember how no pain felt
can count on the hand you can’t lift
your friends
and family
can’t work
or provide
can’t afford pride
or holidays
you manage Christmas, on plastic
can’t walk your children to school
it’s uphill
you’re ill
can’t work
can’t live
can’t provide –
the part that was you
the man that was you
the pride in you
died
Try not to care
that the love of your life
is no longer your wife
but your carer
Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can
- by Linda Cosgriff
United Kingdom
M.E. destroys one life
and ruins more.
Fatigue replaces rage.
Accept it.
- by Linda Cosgriff
Author website
United Kingdom
A
man is
ill. Whispered
recollections
of what he once was
are all that sustain him.
He has no hope. His aching
visions of what should have been kill
comfort. What could have been is a lie.
He has no hope. He has no future. He
has only now. Life took revenge for a
life too well lived. He was a man out
of time. Now, there is nothing but
time. Resilient, he bears
it. He will not die. He
will suffer, always.
He will not die.
He does not,
cannot,
live.
- by Linda Cosgriff
United Kingdom
