You were the thrill of a childhood wrapped in sickness.

Months of endless childhood complaint

in which the hero and heroine captivated me and in which an adventure

was of my own undertaking.

A bout of Bronchitis, battled on one side like a punch bag

with its stuffing flowing out onto the cold gymnasium floor,

the victor raising his hands in mocking tones

high above my head and placing the sickly taste of camphor oil

on harsh felt pillow and scratchy woollen blankets and taunting me

with the knowledge that as I grew older I would not

look at a bed in the same way as others.

Not a place to sleep, nor a place in which to love a beautiful woman,

never did get the hang of the physical act of love

being anything other than painful,

but one to idle into when illness struck, and cursing

the comfortable affliction which stopped me from doing stuff.

 

Confined to bed and my childhood, full of vigour but prone to diseases

and the near fatality of a ruptured appendix,

being told to sleep was alien,

bed was something in which to be ill in, in which to fight against

but also in which to read and you, the paper of my salvation,

the beauty of a single word in a Pound poem,

of the adventures undertaken by Harry Flashman,

my first meeting in a dusty, unlit room at four in the afternoon

with the killer of Agatha Christie,

of the horror within

King and Herbert and the sinking depravity held inside a mind

but tempered with true adoration, love and finding solace

in your words resolved to make the bed near obsolete as a

vessel in which Morpheus never was cradled and even now

I view with suspicion, bad dreams pissing into my waking life.

 

A library is a far better use for a room than a bed, for escaping

into a dream need not be taken whilst asleep.

The judgement of the infirmity gavel need never be struck when

Life is but a word into which sentence, must be passed.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015.