I’ll tell you about M.E.

I read this for the first time on Wednesday at Wicked Words open mike night - (well it was an open floor night as the mike was OS). It got across, and I had many compliments from those I respect after the show. Took over 3 days to recover from the night, and if ANY one shares their feelings of tiredness with me when I mention that I am tired and having a low function day....don't please (unless you have M.E or have a young child and have not had a full nights sleep for 2 years); this is not a tiredness competition, it's my life I am squeezing out of a spent tube.......  

In the Poem below note the spelling of tares, as with my dyslexia I spelt the word as TEARS and not spotted it until I read it out ………now that is part of the truth….tears are words from the soul. 

I’ll tell you about M.E.

I’ll tell you about M.E.

Write down your dreams, your aspirations, on a sheet of paper,

Done it?

Write your aspirations down.

One or two of them, maybe the deeper ones.

Done it?

Now tear it up, tear up the sheet of paper with your aspirations written down on,

Tare the sheet of paper into tiny pieces and throw them to the floor.

Commit littering where you are now, don’t hold back!

Done it?

Do this every day, every hour, in the street, in your seat, in your car, in your kitchen, in your bed, do it where you stand, where you cook, where you think, at the work desk, on your computer..

Not just mentally but in this physical representation of your personal dreams for a future.

This is the process of M.E.

Torn dreams, aching limbs, and an exhaustion that strips you of your souls desires, strips you of your simplest objectives in life,

Tares even the thoughts you are having at a moment in time,

Tares the conversations from your mouth as you are trying to have them, Tares them into shreds.

So you make your dreams smaller,

I’ve read the books, done the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy ‘patient sufferers’ course.

You make your aspirations easier to achieve,

To go and post a letter

To read the next few pages of a novel

To say hello to a friend…
………And I can see you have not got it..

Go on, write these smaller dreams down on a new piece of paper

Now tear them up throw them to the wind, these simpler dreams,

Do this every hour; train your mind to accept this

To accept that even the shadows of your deepest dreams are torn to shreds,

Rendered into a fatty deposit that sinks to the bottom of the latrine of your aspirations.
That there is around you the smell of festered and decomposing dreams……

Your life is not broken, it is torn over and over and over again,

Thrown as confetti the day you became shotgun wedded to this disease

And you now find these torn pieces hidden in the clothing of your personality, the folds of you character

Turning up as decapitated words and scrambled torn individual letters

On thousands of pieces of torn sheets of paper;

Shards spirited away by unseen underground rivers of illness

And I see you might be getting it.

The enormity of this incurable disease that cheats on the body, steals the mind and toils the soul….

So now that you are working it out,

write these thoughts down on a sheet of paper

and tear them up to smaller pieces and send these to your friends

I have no need of them, I have too many of them of my own.






I asked for some comments from 'The M.E. Chat Room' on Facebook, and here are some; Thanks all and 5 likes!

• Katie Godfrey Good descriptive piece, liking the way you've put this across.
• Jeff Baker Thank you. That may sound odd, but thank you for writing this. I just read this out to my missus and its helped her understand some of the things I couldnt find the words to explain.
  Really good work, it's well written and hits the nail on the head as a descriptive
• Donna O'Donnell your words are softly brutal and very true
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