Illness

(inspiration from the book I'm reading The Malazan Book of the Fallen: Book three Memories of Ice) The pain of illness changes you A soul reduced to something piteous A bedraggled, sweat-smeared rat trapped within a rock-fall desperately squirming through cracks in a search a search for a place where pressure relents A space to breathe And the pain all around you those sharp stones, settling, ever settling the spaces between them vanishing darkness rising like water during high tide Achievments and triumphs become trivial all crumple to ash in your mind You are not as you had been the new shaping not to your liking Pain darkened the world Pain dislocated Turned one's own flesh and bones into a stranger's house from which no escape seems possible Bestial blood whispers of freedom of a way out But not from the darkness, no Into that darkness, where the demons went Deep into the abyss the secret heart of a prison The blood's whisper was but one of many each demanding attention each offering contradictory invitations disparate paths of escape Always escape, flight This cowering creature unable to think of anything else even as the burdens settle, continuing to settle Confusion within refuses to end You escaped the prison yet you feel its chains tighten around you drawing even tighter And within the tension, an expectation Of surrender, yielding an expectation to become what? Become what? Sleep becomes an unwelcome thing Night after night pain and dreams, no, nightmares Dark hours spent twisting in bed blood racing through you, sleep is fitful racked with dreams of running on all fours like a beast Then drowning It's the blood of a beast, coursing within you You tried to tell yourself that the blood was the source the source of your paranoia Untrue What you fear is all too real Worse, the vast sense of loss without the ability to trust- anyone Without that, what do you see in the life awaiting you? Naught but solitude, and thus, nothing of value And now, all these voices whispering of escape Escape The pain A child screaming in darkness A beast howling lost in sorrow A soul nailed to the heart of a wound and you think yourself alone God, you wish you were