In the fire of pain

In the intense burning pain I experience with rest or sleep, I can only find peace by placing my awareness outside of myself. I try to convey this with art drawn on my tablet in the aftermath of paralysed agony. I cannot read, write or think, but was able to briefly draw amazingly. I have written a poem to accompany the drawing.

IN THE FIRE OF PAIN

I burn in unending agony.

It only intensifies as I seek rest.

What continual strangeness is this befalling me?

Sleep brings only more pain, greater weakness, more inability.

This is the opposite of what should be.

I float trying to find some peace.

It is a paradox.

There is peace but the price is high.

I am undone by every normal process.

The peace I find is somewhere deep

Yet somewhere far.

I place my awareness in it

In a state of hopefulness,

As far from the pain as mind will take me.

It is glorious, wonderful, perfect

And yet it becomes a trap buried in the jellification of my body.

I cannot waken properly.

I cannot speak.

I cannot move.

I cannot shift myself into outward gear.

The pain has gone from severe to off the scale.

I lie here stuck in a never ending nothingness.

Will it change?

Will any strength or movement come back?

It feels absolutely not so

And yet eventually

I know, somehow, impossibly, it will return

Partially at least

To varying degrees

Nowhere near what others call normality of strength

or even average ability

But life of a kind beyond the depths of emptiness

Somehow drags itself beyond the limitations set me in this broken tormented body

And the search for peace continues unabated.

(Poem and Art by LInda Crowhurst)