Thursday and another decent nights sleep. I take my vitals and once again they are reasonable. I dawdle getting out of bed and having breakfast so much of the morning drifts by. I don’t care really, I am more concerned with how I feel. I mend the broken sea horse wind chimes that were a present from my youngest daughter many years age and rehang them in the garden, I expect the neighbours to be pleased. While out and about in the garden I refill the squirrel feeder and the bird feeders. I suspect the squirrel is responsible for the rapid emptying of the bird feeders. This time of year he should be burying his winter larder but appears not to be bothering yet.
With my garden chores over I select which poem I am going to take to this weekends Poetry Stanza. I choose my entry to the Poetry Society’s competition. Another of the group has also entered a poem and I have to say its much better and certainly more uplifting than mine. The theme of the competition is “counting” and she has taken the term “counting” in the nobleman sense of someone being a Count, as in Count Dracula. Its a very funny poem and made me laugh. Unfortunately I cannot share it here as it is copy righted to her, perhaps I will ask her if I can share it. Here is mine, you might have seen it before.
400
Like my poems life is curated,
it is by filling the abacus that I know the days
since cancer took me.
Now my life is a plethora of numbers,
singularly or in pairs they see inside.
"Is my arithmetic good" I ask
after every vial of blood,
pot of urine or dollop of poo.
My life is enumerated, recorded
so that I and others may tend me.
All my ins and outs in digital,
averaged, plotted and watched
for waning and ebbing.
Life is moonlike, changing shape
dependant on reflection, angles
and the tremulous rotations
of a system trying to maintain
its dynamic equilibrium.
By these calculations
I gauge how many more
mathematical days I have left
to count.
400 15-07-2024
I do not particularly like my poetry but it is what falls out of me and to be honest I would not have it any other way, my poetry is part of me, not a craft or a profession. So having sent my poem to the Stanza membership I gather up my portable office, (rucksack) and head for the Shed where I spend the next couple of hours writing letters. There is a crisis coming I am running out of paper and envelopes so at some point I will be seeking to resupply myself. I am also short on stickers to adorn my letters with so they too need to be ordered. Satisfied that I have made a decent effort for the first time since the 1st of August to write a letter I lock the Shed up and return to the house to prepare for the trip to the village.
Of course the post office is the first stop so I can send my letters on their way and then I plod, like Gray’s ploughman, to the other end of the village to collect my latest bag of drugs. I resist the co-op and its boxes of after eights as I am about to go on a caffeine free regime before my scan on Wednesday. It was going to be Tuesday but the nuclear bunnies have moved me. I have decided to go from tomorrow (Friday) all the way through to Wednesday without any form of caffeine. However you can bet your life that on the way back from the hospital on Wednesday I will be downing a Snickers and a Red Bull.
Once home I settle down to do the days crosswords, which I sailed through, and then took delivery of my hard back copy of Before We Forget Kindness. I’m really looking forward to reading it. I think it is the fourth book in the Before The Coffee Gets Cold series, that I have enjoyed immensely.
The evening arrives and I eat tea prepared by my partner and then settle down to draft the blog and watch yet another football match. I seem to be falling into watching a match and then going to bed, which means I am clocking up some useful sleeping hours, which has got to be a good thing. So onwards to night meds and an an early night, chores permitting.
