My Lagging Heart

... beats in an uncertain, puzzled rhythm, 

slow to change, never in unison 

with the requests of its host.

Trapped in turbulence, my gut, 

shaken by heart’s dizziness, cycles endlessly from wet

to dry – from predictable to random, 

from motility to functionless churning.

My body’s sense of personal posture and location 

cannot itself be found.

Limb and trunk muscles exhaust themselves, 

each battling for supremacy, while my brain, 

fighting protein invaders, forgets to fuel the engines of movement.  

Inexorably, the machinery of life deteriorates, 

quietly losing 

a function here, a movement there.

My eyes miss bits of landscape, busily constructing 

what isn’t there from what is. 

My sleeper’s mind breaks out of its dream-cage and hijacks

the late-night hours with its own mad dance.

A sailor in a stormy sea, my spirit sags.  My soul prepares 

for eventual flight.  Sleepless, unhappy, 

trapped in a fool’s errand of untouchable symptoms

and unlikely treatments, I fall, then crawl 

towards the lamp that Hope lights 

at the far end of a dark tunnel.

© George Phillips, 2017

A light at the end of the tunnel
Photo by Thomas Quine
Kuching, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia ~ 2015
from Wikimedia Commons