Join Leeds Millions Missing 2021 NOW on Facebook as exclusive interviews and content goes live.
If you can’t wait any longer you can access all the interviews right now by checking out the offical page here.
LIVE NOW – Join Leeds Millions Missing 2021
ME and Me 
It’s OK; as long as I don’t move – M.E. Stage #2
I get no healthy body-after-exercise painful glow
Just moving even, can bring pain and confusion.
The symptoms, like glaciers, grind relentlessly on.
Leaves me waking most mornings with a hangover defect,
Not from booze, drugs or a good night out, but from my own health,
Cheating on me; two timed and screwed over,
Gone off and left me, with my entire life emptied, leaving me to live on
With only the clunk of crushed beer cans underfoot to remember the party.
With a body of complaints to keep me company,
A memory that says ‘it didn’t used to be like this’.
I look like you, or you, look like myself in the mirror
But am cursed with the whispered silent spell of post activity malaise.
It’s OK, I will feel fine, I will get better, just as long as I don’t move!
It’s not a battle I can win but a war, a long campaign,
Gut deep determination, so don’t tell me
to get myself together, to push and drive.
I cannot stand toe to toe with this illness and win
No ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ between even the weakest heavy-weights.
It’s no heroic struggle to walk on false legs
No walk to the North Pole with a royal sponsor
Get this out of your minds.
In so many of your eyes it is a false illness, perhaps a deception,
A scrounger on the prowl. I see it; you not comprehending,
You the caring but sanctimoniously healthy, the sceptical,
Telling me it’s all in the mind, not understanding,
Not listening to the simple statement I state again and again,
It’s OK, I will feel fine, I will get better; just as long as I don’t move!
Jonathan Eyre – an absent poet – © 2014
LikeLike