The Aqueous Cream has been poured on

with liberal effect to the scales that protrude

and cluster like some jagged rock formation

on a distant alien planet, dead, the atmosphere silent

save for the cosmic winds that ravage the surface

still further, slowly eroding it away, the dust

of a billion years dying a second time and settling

into comfortable oblivion.

 

I remember watching The Singing Detective as a child,

I felt sympathy for Marlowe’s plight and the embarrassment

of a nurse in helping an old man out, but secretly loving

the women who care above all else in the world

even more and disliking the Doctors with raw passion

who had nearly allowed me to die when my appendix

ruptured between Bicester and the John Radcliffe,

I had found Dennis Potter to be a God amongst men

and felt for the architect who was cracked and broken

as the man he had created.

 

Little knowing that I would get older,

as I lay in that hospital ward, silently

wondering if it had been better had I passed into the ether

then and saved any misery I may have caused to others

since, that I would develop many illnesses

as my body continually rejected and became allergic to

me, just as my brain grew weary of the body it was in.

This latest bout, the worst since 2009, where

seventy percent of my body was covered for six

torturous weeks,

has driven me half mad,

my skin on my joints has been inflamed,

making each typed word agony

and burst open like a cheap paper built dam

destroyed by a raging storm and the flotsam

ending in a quarry of rubbish somewhere

wrapped in toilet tissue and agonised screams

that I have kept on the down side lest my neighbours

believe me to be truly insane.

 

I felt it coming, it bubbled under the surface

and made me itch and scratch and cry with

a pain that was not yet ready

to be seen erupting on the surface,

the spectacular fall out of a comet

bouncing off the moon

and yet it is here

eating away at my skin once more,

I tip my hat to the God amongst men

for he at least turned it into entertainment

and enlightenment;

I

just get the point of screaming

in the dark.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015