More than a spoonful of sugar is needed
to help this medicine go down.
Keep it down.

The bitterness of bile,
of a hundred pills regurgitated,
the sick after-taste of strangers' pity,
of your Hippocratic hypocrisy.

'Pain is irrelevant,' you tell me.
Fuck you.
Stand here and let me hurt you for a while,
then we'll see how irrelevant it is.

The system's failed me,
my body betrays me
and my mind
is only half my own - sub-let to opiate analgesia.

I stand on borrowed, metal legs,
defined by the things I cannot do,
rather than by the things I can.

I'm not looking for sympathy.
I don't need your empathy.
I don't want help or special dispensation,
I'm not interested in your compassion.

I just want you to know
that, while you haven't fixed me,
you never broke me either.

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