I’m Sick

I apologise for not replying to your emails and comments or for checking out your new poems for napowrimo yesterday.  On Monday, a man who must have lost the use of his arms because he couldn’t raise them to cover his mouth, coughed on me.  Now I have a throat that could star in a Ninja Knives advert and enough self pity to revert to teenagerdom.

I spent yesterday at my do I really have to get a job when I feel like this? course and chasing printers around Stockport (a story for another day).  Then I went to bed.  I have dragged myself out again this morning and I am overdosing on vitamin C in an attempt to get mobile because, actually, I do really want a job even though I feel like this.  I may not get to your poems and emails and comments today because it has taken me thirty minutes to write this between the dramatic hand on fevered brow and checking for plague pustules on my arms, so apologies again.  I quite understand if you ignore me.

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We only have two more days of napowrimo and I don’t want to fail so close to the end, but I really wasn’t up to writing yesterday, so here’s  a pair of acrostics I prepared earlier:

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Countdown 

Death is sweet instants away; or perhaps bitter
Years.  We know not when, or how.
Sure that it will come, patient
Time counts each day; softly
Opens the doors to
Paradise and elsewhere,
In certainty.
Always.

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A Response to Complaints About My Last Poem 

Unlike
Thomas More
Or his seminal
Piece – his peace dream –
I have no hope that
Any future world will be agreeable.

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