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Sébastien Houix

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Facing it

You don’t want to know, when you become disabled.
When you have watched your limbs changed into bones.
You ignore the facts.
You keep quiet about the falls and cover the bruises.
When the walk from the station is too hard
you drive. And you disregard the meaning of this as easily as
you put the guitar in its case,
closed the piano you couldn’t really play
and pencilled in your last appointment.
Now you speak of your last skiing holiday as if you were going again
tomorrow.

 


The author writes: Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is an attack on motor neurones which kills. It destroys all muscles, including those that allow you to breathe, within a few years. Public awareness, research and funding are lacking. There is no medical solution.

     I used poetry to voice my impressions of life with MND largely because poems can be short and as such less physically demanding.

     Many thanks to my friend Adam Thorpe who put faith and hard work into this.


Sébastien Houix died in July of this year, not long after these poems were accepted. They are Houix’s first published poems and are from a long sequence entitled MND. Adam Thorpe is the author of the collection From the Neanderthal (Cape, 1999).

 

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