Poetry & Artwork of Lyme Sufferers

I have decided to include the poetry and artwork of other Lyme sufferers here on the LAAP cyber Gallery. If you have a poem or artwork that relates to and expresses your Lyme disease experience you can send it to me via email . If it is artwork please send a quality JPEG photo of it to me. Include a short story about you and your Lyme disease journey and I will post it on the gallery with your poen or artwork.
Remember to look for my replies to your emails in your spam folder!

College Tuition
Photo by Adrian Schlesinger

Trees

As the afternoon moved in
So did the mist hover among the hills,
Just tops of evergreens
Touching the gray clouds.

All below in the valley silenced, invisible -
No moving thing to measure
Against the steady rain.

Peace kept me from wanting to visit
Beyond this hillside view.
I would rather that those below
Had become ghosts for a while,

Spirits less real than this ethereal dream
I shared with the few dark, bare trees
Writing a serene hieroglyph
Against the sky.
                                   -Glenroy B. Wolfsen age 67 New Jersey

I will never forget this day. I don't know why, certain days just linger in memory.
I had driven up the hill to the shopping mall in the next town probably to stop for some food I needed. But this day in November, 5 years ago - was cold, damp, misty and the fog was moving in. I remember oh so well, how the head fog was so bad that day, and it matched perfectly the outside weather - my inner weather and the outer weather just then came together.
I didn't get out of my car - but just turned off the engine and sat - feeling all my surrounding surreal ( or more, perhaps an inner isolation, making the external seem surrealistic)- and where I was parked up on the hill, the valley below was becoming slowly invisible - and I on the hill, alone and in my own invisible fog inside my head. Then it came to me that I might write how it felt - and I remember so clearly now how quickly the words came - so I give you now this single moment (as a snap-shot) in the long agony of mind-fog - one day where all this came together in the inner and outer weather: -Glen

OUR LADY OF EXHAUSTION

Doctor,
Your palace walls are hung with
the mandalas of the ancients.
Your eyes blaze the fervor of the true believer.
Too much self, oh wise one. Too much of you.

You, the Grand Inquisitor.
Me, Our Lady of Exhaustion, on the rack.
The inquisition asks the questions.
But look. I am an open book.
Yet you have missed the important parts.

Here is what I am wondering, human brother.
You have studied with the great ones,
hanging degrees upon your wall.
But do you imagine that you have learned so much more than I?
My crash course in suffering and loss, pain and joy,
has been a ten year journey in the vast classroom
of my bed sheets.
My teachers too are great ones.

When so exhausted that only adrenaline fumes are powering me,
it is hard for me to speak from my soul as you demand.
A disadvantage, I think-
you full of power, and me full of desperation.
The Catch-22's of the land of Gurus!

Listen.
I have come from the benign neglect of the streets of Chicago,
through the alchemy of illness,
to the malignant, pulsing succor of the mystery of Earth.
This is what keeps me here, this aliveness of both body and beast.

Do not torture me and demand allegiance-
too high a price to pay.
We are all called to wonder in awe at one another-
our ignorance, our innocence, our ambivalent hope.
The path is different every time
though the space around it pulses with the same heartbeat.
Doctor,
Listen to yours.
Listen to mine.