Flu Blog: Fever the Two

I swim sweetly sweatily sweat-swaddled into the dripping past. What is this imbalance, hot and wet, hot and sweat, steamily unpleasant around me? The flu is it, or a twenty year vintage malaria bottled up inside like bad Paraguayan wine? I feel unpropitiated and unpropitiated bugs from an unguarded past teem in my wings. I waded the potato patch yesterday looking for signs of disease. The signs are manifest now. The disease is here. Was I blighted by a leppercorn? I am bitten! Something has bit me! Is it the new pills or the flat exhaustion that comes from living as if I am 30 years of age, crisscrossing this land again and again like a roadie on speed? I just awoke from a nightmare. Or did I wake into one? I am a small island runnelled with lava flows, steaming beside a sunless sea. I wake. I do not recognise the room. My paintings scream and leer from the walls. It was a bad move to hang them! With glee they start their haunting, subconscious effusions released into malicious form. I should have left them beyont in the deep dark place. I stand like a wraith, feeling for the door, my foot in the cooking pan, the ready vomitorium. The night is not over.

“You may laugh at the way a worm walks.
It may seem scarcely more than an oozement.
But the sensitive worm, when he's out for a squirm,
will not share in your churlish amusement.

Don't forget, the worm always laughs last,
and he'll laugh very loud when you're dead-oh!
and he'll spread you for miles
in those little brown piles
that are like Walnut-Whips in the meadow!
Worms, worms, dying to meet you!
Worms, worms, waiting to eat you!
Worms!”