Today was one of those days where a poem started well, then took a long, hard slog to finish.
Iain Banks, a great writer whose work spanned multiple genres, was sadly diagnosed with incurable cancer, we discovered today. A good man who will leave behind an excellent body of work to be remembered by.
Less importantly (and sympathetically) I did my back in. Both got me thinking about injury and illness. Thankfully one of my march-written prompts (see day 1) was “hypochondria”. Guess what today’s poem is about?
Getting a list of injuries together, both the simple and the slightly sinister, was not hard. Building up a paranoid momentum however, proved somewhat challenging. Trying to write it whilst crawling through lots of late paperwork and travel plans probably didn’t help the process (trying to sort late paperwork will nearly always ruin my day creatively).
What I’ve got is a poem. It is a poem that is everything stated above: paranoid, a little sinister, definitely mountain-out-of-molehill stuff, which is (on a superficial level at least) the stuff this disease is made of. Statstics and fear should probably make more headway into it, but I didn’t have enough focus with this draft to make it happen. I’d like to re-write this one with a bit more research handy, but for the aim of writing a poems a day, I feel it has done its job.
