The Metaphysics of Mononucleosis

Someone requested a copy of this poem during the Broken Reflections launch. It was first published in Rhyme and PUN-ishment. 

The Metaphysics of Mononucleosis

Sometime between
feeling like I was slipped
sleeping pills and I drank
Miracle-Gro for tonsils,
I read Kant.


Not that I’d know from experience,
but reading Kant with Mono
is like reading Kant high
and, in some cases, 
reading him while lucid.

Black splotches on
the pages dizzied my
half-closed eyes and brain
and I wished profusely
my tonsils would stop
touching, my head would stop 
throbbing and my legs would 
feel like they still
had bones in them.

Heidegger and Descartes
haunted my dreams
when I could sleep.
It seems like I spent
most of my time only
wishing I could sleep.

Or, maybe I was
dreaming I was wishing to
sleep because…

Maybe the whole thing
was a dream.  The whole damn
disease could be
the product of my subconscious.
But does it exist?
What is truth?

Vision blurred, I would phase
back into my corporeal
shell from across the room.
Confused phantasms
formed in my head as I
tried to read and
mix labor with Locke
or understand the book
as the most cryptic
extension of myself.

My equal and opposite
self is greater than or equal
to the part that postulates
this syllogism:
If Q implies Pain and
P implies fatigue
Then,  .:  (therefore) any answer but
the truth is a
fallacy.

Not fallacy like the castle
in The Little Mermaid either.  
The real kind.

But, What is truth?  Is it 
the photo of a bust
of Aristotle (An image of
an image) which saved me
half a page’s reading?
  Is the beating of
my temples more true
than that of my heart because
I feel it more?  
I remember reading an essay on
this once:
“Rain is a pain, and 
that’s the truth.”
Something like that.

My mononucleotic Doctrine?
MY EVERYTHING HURTS
and that’s the truth.