Book Fever

The trouble is,

the brain – of which

this is an inflammation –

affects the body too.

So you see, it isn't just

'all in the mind'. (Oh if only 

it were! There it is so delicious, 

so delirious, so absorbing, 

so heavenly transporting....)

But also there are troublesome

symptoms – physical effects.

For instance the deafness.

I keep missing what others

are saying: their calls

to work, to duty. And the eyes,

the tunnel vision; I lose

my peripheries, I can focus

nowhere else but the page.

It even takes the appetite.

Hours I go without food,

never thinking of it.

Though sometimes 

there's the opposite effect –

the craving for sugar,

the over-abuse of coffee –

of course subsidiary

to the morbid rejection of sleep.

Yet, when I need to be alert,

I slump on my bed

overcome by lethargy,

almost motionless

except for the feverish eyes,

and my frantic hands

flipping the pages. Worst of all,

there is no known cure. It's a life 

sentence ... hot sentences, burning.

Little girl reading a book in a burned-out forest by simpleinsomnia on Flickr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Written for Dark Poetry for the Cruellest Month Day 8: Fictitious Afflictions. (This one is assuredly fictitious, and also poetic.)

Also linked to Tuesday Platform, April 19 at 'imaginary garden with real toads'.