is just being alive,
magnified

the way a torturer
makes it hurt

or the way you wake, peaceful,
fever gone, to clean sun light

oh how it may go on, chronic,
your life through its lens

lostness more lost,
strangeness stranged familiar,
a moment’s reprieve, heavenly,

nectar to drink, think on, distil ,
bid grow toward its blissful cure-all

meanwhile, this is life
its medicine is living it

a full account, books uncookable,
dreaming of clear dawn light

(c) A. H / K. H-H (24th & 27th October 2018)

Published in Survivors’ Poetry Poetry Express #57 amongst others that got some very nice feedback. I hesitated to write it – as whilst I know certain ways of being ill (and certain ways I dispute it) there are so many I do not that might make my ways seem petty, but it resonated with others’ reading Poetry Express.