for a split second
a thought crosses my mind
- by anonymous
Canada
Tag: fear/distress/grief
Where does it even start?
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know
How can I tell each apart?
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know
Where does it even end?
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know
Why isn’t my body my friend?
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know
- by @RoseClue (twitter, instagram), @ Advanced Wizards, @Watercolors (facebook)
USA
body hangs off me like a scab,
torture-punished brain a scared little animal peering out of skull,
rats gnaw at the base of psyche,
lick rusty razor blade,
electric flame slice belly,
fiery metal spears dangle from gut,
The great beast paws idly at my entrails,
sparking shark teeth chew slowly up leg,
thrust scorching metal skewers slowly down meat of thighs,
pack burning steel wool into hollow shrieking calves,
porcupine worms writhe inside veins forever chewing out of meat and skin,
skate barefoot across field of burning blades,
walk face first into blazing buzz saw,
again,
again,
again,
I can feel the flames
but I can’t see the light.
The image shows my face looking upwards with beams of pain shooting from my eyes. I hide behind a purple beard. Alien antennas sprout from my broad-brimmed hat. My face is neutral–hiding my pain.
- by Doug Sharp
Youtube: Central Pain Syndrome “Message from Hell #1: How Are You?“
Twitter: @DougDroogSharp
U.S.A.
The difference between lowercase-p, pain, and uppercase-P, Pain, is huge.
Bigger than just a shift-key should make it.
The difference between “Yeah, let’s go on a hike today!” and “I can’t walk today.”
The difference between pain that ends, and Pain that just backs off for a while.
The difference between the morning pills and the afternoon pills and the evening pills and the night pills and the pills and the pills and the injections and the appointments and the Pain.
The differences between the screaming in your head and the screaming locked in the gilded cage in your throat, and the knowledge that it is a bird that will never die, it will just remain in you, like a bird throwing itself against a window pane.Yes, pain and Pain are so completely different, I can’t believe they’re even spelled that same way.
- by M-S-Y
United States
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
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
| Twenty minutes; one thousand two hundred seconds, nothing really, unless you’re waiting, waiting to be told about something you may not want to hear. I feel different; my body is telling me there is a problem. Seventeen have passed. I’m sitting in a room where time has stood still. I’m surrounded by a sea of unknown faces, all waiting with me. Some are biting their lips; others stare into space like I am. There are only two outcomes, positive, or negative. Polar opposites. “Steven? Come on through.” I follow with my heart in my mouth. “Take a seat.” I do as I’m told. She is smiling at me. But it’s not giving me any comfort. She begins talking, but her words disappear into white noise. My heart has left my mouth and disappeared into the pit of my stomach. I have the answer. Now all I have are questions.
|
- anonymous author
England
No one talks about Occam’s other idea,
the hammer,
when his razor didn’t cut deep enough,
his hammer smashed down.
‘Of an event occurring, it is most likely that the simplest one is the correct one’
‘Of an inevitability occurring, the one that hurts the most is the correct one’
When Occam’s hammer falls,
it’s not a matter of when or where it lands,
it’s simply a matter of how hard it hits,
and if this time you choose to scream.
- by Garry Coulthard
