are you aware that your illness affects your mind and your body?

I am aware that my body is part of my mind and that it is stretched tightly over a roll-cage of stone-colored metal. In the morning, even when I am an illness, you wake from the dry mussel of my body you’ve wrap your arms around. There may be a cure, each pill may be a stripped bolt stuck in its fitting. You come to me in the evening and feel the chill of my panels aching. I push the bolts, my hands blackened, I push the bolts and you tell me to go to sleep.

what has become of the common sense and will power that you have displayed with respect to other matters?

When I am coming through the mountains I see you in the porch light, combing your hair, watching the pink light fall across the sky like a mess on our carpet. I want to come to you and say that I am rising, that I am getting better, but I know you would look through me with your casketed eyes, that you would hear me say that I am the ocean, that I am the broken atmosphere being healed by fewer emissions, that I am a drip of candle wax.