AUBREY HIGGIN

MARCH 2017

February & January

Worry

All attest that to be young is to be able.

Yet I stay trapped in myself, confined in the prison of my mind by this sickness.

Examined and injected to no avail.

No doctor can discern my condition; the sickness lies in the shadows.

My anonymous captor.

With unknown enemies to fight, I resign to helplessness.

Adrift on a sea of Nausea.

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Isolation/Pain

Drowning in sweat, dizzy from exhaustion.

Yet no marathon have I conquered, only an inane conversation down the hallway.

Leaving this bed is a poisoned chalice.

That 5 minutes was my week’s highlight, yet my body is burning, beaten and bruised.

Entrapped in a vessel of pain.

If true loneliness is desiring what all others have, true isolation is desiring normality.

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The tunnel is dark, with no end in sight.

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Why

I haven’t been so open, so vulnerable or exposed

But now I know that now this is how the wind blows

For my life, my animus, from me so viciously torn

For I am weaker now, for I’ve a staggering thorn

I've been away a long long while, at least it feels that way

I haven't had the strength to smile, nor the time of day

Even every step I take is a tiresome lonesome walk

I even feel my eyes to fade every time I talk

I rise at the break of morn with a head of blistering nails

Did I do something wrong, where did I fail?

My wistful eye wanders up to the tent of blue

But then I'm smacked in the back by the dreadful truth

Last night I had no whisky, no wine, or gin, or beer

Why then am I feeling so helpless, weak, and queer

Why must I change my shirt five more times a day

I feel so tired and weary I can’t form words to pray

But if I had a question to God that I could ask

I would ask him for the help to do even the simplest task

I’d know He’d answer loud and clear, sagaciously and wise

Though I doubt I’d hear His answer above my mother’s cries

Don’t cry for me dear mother, don’t sigh for me my pa

I don’t know when the end will come but I know that it’s not far

My eye won’t be so wistful, my thoughts so forlorn

For I will be stronger then, from this staggering thorn

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ENCYSTATION

It's taken me a long time to get young

And now I finally approach my youth

At least what's left of it

Stolen from the besetting clutches within the arena of the unwell

An arena I've longed to escape

But my helplessness my handicap

And my helplessness their burden

Has forbidden my departure

But to no fault of my own

Only now I realize

I wish, I wish, oh, I wish in vain

That the war will end with this battle, I pray

This final skirmish from the gates

Where death will die this day

I will be responsible

No more sweats and no more pain

No more headaches and no more restraints

I will leave the tomb I have long been inhumed within

This body of mine

I cannot allow to taint my mind

The only bastion of any kind of strength I have left

But as I said I can be dead already and dead again

I know where I will make my home

And this ailment has allowed me to realise

That home is where I choose it to be

And now I will evangelise, proselytise and idolise

The only way away from encystation

That no man may fall the same heights as I

To the same depths of me

It's my burden

That is too heavy to carry

But too light to drop

It is my torch, my cross to bear

But I will prevail

Like a shot from its sling

Tempered of heroic heart

I will endure, we will endure

April