I am going to be sick

Strange, all the possible states which ‘sick’ composes. It itches first at the back of my throat, as if the purposeful nail of a forefinger is dragging, dragging.  I gag silently,  my body momentarily bent under the mounting fuzz. My  frame seems almost like an old metal coil. Greased and cracked with misuse, occasionally coming into a kind of tensional contact with spasms of itself, then  shrinking back.

It is only as I gag again that I become aware of the connection of my throat to something deeper. It is like the coil id being turned through a horrible flush of water, and sense an immersion from mouth to stomach. That part of the body feels angry, hostile. I place damp hand against the stomach and feel a kind of instant clotting.

A simultaneous knotting, like the lashes are being drawn backwards tied behind my eyes.  My body foams to erupt into noise, the desperate rapture of believing itself poisoned. It swears and gloats in its melodrama. Fingers claw up my throat though they swim up through a kind of fog, there is a damp cloth in my mouth though I am not sure who has put it there.

There are fingers in my hair, innumerable, immeasurable, teasing the strands.

I turn over in the bed and inspect the nurse the hooded white topped with a piercing brightness. It is the lamp beside the glass of water beside the photograph. Everything seems arranged in some unnerving chronology. There are occasional pangs as if another pair of hands are attempting to reach through my  ribs.

Nobody wants to see this. Not when the vomit drips from the corner of the eyes.

They would rather see the conventional ‘sick’, that of a tangible past – food and traceable liquid.

But crying is insipid, the pool from which nobody knows the source.

And it’s dirty, of course.