160 Illness poems

A migraine's aura swallows an eye from a face into gapless, absent folds of unseeing. His scars concealed, the three-legged cat limps fluidly along a soft shore redrawn by storms.

No longer if we’ll get cancer but when, the doctor said. Now questions accrete around the irritant like pearl: Not when but how? Not how but whom? And then why. And then why not. I take a can of ashes to the beach and empty them into the wind. Outside the trash man collects bottles like a miser rattling his jewels, tossing them onto the growing heap.

No shards where one is bound to no place in the first place all shards we were clear on that from the beginning Absence is always sudden to hear your voice once more more echo than shrapnel qualia of the forbidden transforms itself into wounds regenerates a hydra or lizard tail touch me I’m alive again there isn’t enough time or proximity for your essence or mine          to vanish we’ll remain fire and ice who turn to glass that doesn’t shatter mercury if it shatters

the fields beneath (st pancras old church) I make my tour of the garden waiting room where the tall trees wander among the corpses. I might go past the last resting place of Sir John Soane in his stone telephone kiosk, or the wooden bench where the Beatles sat on their “Mad Day Out” July 28th, 1968. The body of J.C. Bach, “The English Bach,” lies somewhere near here, lost to the Railway in 1865. A plaque remembers him as Queen Charlotte’s music tutor, who collaborated with someone and died young. Perhaps Jerry Cruncher got him, or perhaps he survived and is strolling with his friend in the fields beneath. I drag my feet through the backsliding seasons towards a gate in the wall with its timetable of opening hours. the song of the needles Needles have the sudden beauty of a first line. They’re always new and surprising as they burst from their paper covering. They sing as they hit the air. You catch sight of them out of the corner of your eye, glinting softly to themselves as they contemplate their next move. What they’re suggesting is inspired, but a certain sadness attends their description of what is going on. You don’t know whether to look away, or accept what they’re saying. If you’re lucky you’ll feel a pop as one of them enters your fistula and a cool feeling of recognition spreads up through your arm. grand canyon suite Every few minutes someone’s alarm goes off because of a blood clot or a sudden fall in pressure, then the first two notes of Ferde Grofé’s “On the Trail” goes clip-clopping down the Grand Canyon of the ward. Now the first two notes of the song are joined by the same two notes from a neighboring machine, then another two, and another, till the whole hopeless blind herd is clip-clopping off into the sunset.

Knowledge is Power. That is what the billboard says and I agree. I am an adult, therefore I understand the threat of passengers. The threat to Our Children, who don't understand the threat of these bird-like, twitchy people. They pose two kinds of threat. To begin with, there is the one we all know about, the predatory threat, the hawk-like passengers that prey on children as they sit in front of their computers or televisions. The terrorist threat. That threat is easy to handle. You shoot it. You contain it. You confiscate. You stitch. You bleed from various orifices and sockets, but you survive, you rebuild house and rinse the child. The more serious threat is the diseases passengers carry with them. Internal terrorism. Children love those diseases. It makes them babble like possessed. Their make-up looks like oil in the moonlight. Such children cannot be cleaned off. Kill them. Or turn them into entertainment. Art.

spare us your burial rites spare us the first rib the flood, the resurrection spare us your dairy & meats your belief in a life after this one heaven’s a city we’ve been priced out of our mothers fled for more affordable children for the price of liver heaven wants nothing to do with pleasure on earth on this the occasion of my brother’s wedding i need something awful done to my body heaven’s a boy who wants me to crawl through his mother’s midnight-window heaven’s the condom splitting into light heaven’s not a place more a wound i make & pass through when we’re done he asks how many men i’ve fucked this month & not loved spare me the quilt & blankets spare me the look in his eyes when he takes me careful as a poison inside him spare me the lecture on the survival of my body & i will spare you my body

when i say pre-exposure prophylaxis you think easy fix. greek in origin. an act of guarding. east of here a small temple. inside parishioners strip nude as armless statues, their stone genitals hardening under a chemist’s glare. the garden out front fecund & tended. the garden inside bare. when i say tenofovir disoproxil you think chemical names. saint names. names without origin. an unpronounceable string of letters. the generic names of petty angels. the drug’s molecular makeup applied in & around the eyes & lips. the names of viruses & blind trials. the kept-vial of love. the unknowable side effects of blood. when i say oral emtricitabine you think once a day swallow a small sun & all hymn in you comes undone the way a lit match deads the smell of a public bathroom when i say nucleotide analog reverse transcriptase inhibitor you think thirsty epidemic you push the blue pill through its foil you know each new medicine trails our dead behind it like wedding cans listen you can hear them now can’t you?

It thuds and clanks like tennis shoes in a dryer, only I am the shoe, sour, damp and wedged into the narrow metal tube, heart clanging.

For ten years I would not say the name. I said: episode. Said: setback, incident, exacerbation—anything but be specific in the way this is specific, not a theory or description, but a diagnosis. I said: muscle, weakness, numbness, fatigue. I said vertigo, neuritis, lesion, spasm. Remission. Progression. Recurrence. Deficit. But the name, the ugly sound of it, I refused. There are two words. The last one means: scarring. It means what grows hard, and cannot be repaired. The first one means: repeating, or myriad, consisting of many parts, increasing in number, happening over and over, without end.

...one begins, ungratefully, to long for the contrasting tone of some honest, unironic misery, confident that when it arrives Roddy Lumsden will have the technical resources to handle it. Neil Powell, TLS I’m trying to string together three words which I hate more than I hate myself: gobsmacked, hubby and...when I realise that words no longer count for much at all. And that’s me back down, head on the floor. It’s like Cathal Coughlan goes in his song: till I’ve seen how low I can go. It’s like what my ancestor told me in a dream: You’ll be a sponge for the pain of others. It’s like what I told the lassie from the local paper: I do not suffer for my art, I just suffer. And face it, while we’re at it, it’s like what curly Shona said that night at Graffiti when all the gang were gathered for the show: how she reckoned I would be the first to die, or the time I slipped back from the bogs in Bo’s to hear my best friend tell a stranger girl who’d been sweet in my company,mind how you go with Roddy, he’s damaged goods, you know.