Strange how a nerve can ruin one’s sex drive.
For a week I lay on my back, tendons

frozen, muscles in knots, pinched nerve alive,
burning. All those stories of sex demons

who feed on the cum of the sick are bunk.
I slid out of my head in pain. Nothing

happened. No one appeared in my punch-drunk
fevers. For a week I lay there: crying,

praying the pain away. As if. It’s why,
at that moment, if I could have bartered

my soul away to end all this I would’ve.
It’s a sad day when even succubi

pass you by. My tongue rot. My vision slurred.
My mind forlorn over love … sublime love.

Note:
I’m on day 14 of dealing with a pinched nerve on the left side of my back. Hot and cold compresses, messages and the like do nothing. The pain has been slowly making its way up my neck, across my shoulder and down into my biceps. There is no way to get comfortable, no way of easing what is constant and unchanging, no escape. As the poem puts it, I am slowly sliding out of my head but not in any dandy shamanic-like manner. All I have is that ill-stomach feeling, like when I broke my arm and could do nothing but stare ahead in horror.