When People Ask, What's Wrong with You? and There Is No Explanation That Will Do   Pain is a Pied Piper leading the parade and you have no choice but to follow Hollow-eyed from broken sleep, dark circles for eyes, helpless as a mewling child   Muscles weakened and out of favor bones and joints failing, swollen ankles blue veins blossoming across legs Pain beckons and shows the way   Gritted teeth, shortness of breath, troubled bowels The list of symptoms a terrible tautology   Analgesics' dangerous lethe can kill in your sleep or muddle your brain awake so you cannot dive deep and think and dream or even take the next hopeful breath   Oh! to mourn the daily deaths chronic pain's constant companion Vexing, petty, unable to do this and then that until the whole world is flat and without savor       This first poem above is very recent. Fresh as daily bread as I wrote it over this weekend. I had the first lines a year or so ago but Anny's invitation to submit to the "Health and Illness" issue has prompted the rest.                                                          Modern Woman, Walking Out                         It’s her womb again,                     old friend and nemesis, disinclined                     for dry dock, eager for the red                      tide despite the pills she swallows.                     Her bones, experts assure her, will                       stay strong, hold her up longer.                     But this blood, she thinks,                     as she walks into the rain                     a few days before summer solstice,                     her furthest north yet,                       to the clinic parking lot,                     redolent with balm of Gilead.                     Twenty-two hours the sun journeys,                     can you believe it?                     Here where she held her blood                     up to the scrutiny of all that light,                     a modern woman                     claiming the word cottonwood,                     caressing each syllable,                     braided and wet                       on her tongue.                     Jumping puddles wreathed with pollen,                     the brightest light.                                      Her hair, gray                     as far as  she can see.                          This is an unpublished poem but not about the fibromyalgia or spinal stenosis or any of the debilitating conditions I am dealing with now.  I wrote it when I was living in Alaska and dealing with anovular bleeding.                                                                                   A Cabin I Inhabit                         The holes in these bones                     fill slowly, mortar         chinking up, the work                     of invisible servants         Not at my command                     or so it seems                     Baba Yaga                     makes a clean sweep                     with her iron broom         and a cold north wind                     scours the narrow spaces          A skeleton light as                     a quilt feather                     rides the blast                     Open to the night         a supple spine                     a snake entwined       I wrote this in 1989  while living in the North Carolina mountains and working as a Visiting Artist for the North Carolina Arts Council.  I was having to confront deepening difficulties with my on-going spinal stenosis, which has only worsened in the past two decades.           © Christina Pacosz Kansas City, USA