This/that/the other

I choked and gagged on the pills as they stuck in my throat- Tramadol and codeine- inducing a coughing fit and my spluttering water as I tried ever harder to swallow their robust shapes, cutting my throat softly as they slowly sank away. I became nauseated by marijuana smoke and the amalgamation of all noises and smells hitting upon me like a torrent, unrelenting. And with all my strength, which was not much, I paced myself to ascend the stairs to the bathroom where I grew cold with fever as the sweat saturated my clothes from without my pores.
   I shook, red as a cardinal, and vomited into the cleared, bleached basin before me. A white spew, full of floating half eaten grapes (that I had failed to ingest as breakfast) dashed about as I tempered my forehead with a cool pattering hand. My phlegm was mixed with blood and I felt much less a man of the western, 'civilised' world, and instead, a repulsive beast from some far shore. A barbarian, like the English cannibals.
Wretched and hulking, I headed for bed.

The Other

I suffer an inordinate and irrational phobia of answering the phone, calling another, maintaining the loose conversation across the invisible wire. The necessity caused by duty and obligation was a single factor. Now it is a physical pain. I'm feverish, again, with pain and only liquids to sate my palette. Caring for plants is good for your soul.

The girl awaits
away from her intrinsically intricate
and effeminate room
where there lies,
upon her bed,
a hybrid, half-breed:
man and tiger,
not so clear cut as alike
The Centaur.
   He is bronzed, like the beturbaned sultan;
an animal of the Orient,
but in place of their shared
full toothed and lascivious grin
awaiting the intercourse-
the meal on legs to enter the harem-
there resides a frown
for the fear he creates with bite from fang.
As like a man of thought he ponders
his place;
his true entrapment,
his skin is a cage.
For he wants not her heart
but her hand
and to receive only her love...

Something about the number '9'

Nine. I found nine mistakes.
Nine is less than ten.
It is more than eight, however, and all the numbers below it.
There are many numbers; an infinitesimal quantity, in fact.
Somewhere, there is a computer, and its only job is to count.
It counts; calculating faster than any human brain, and counting forever, or for however long it is programmed to, or else, has power enough to count.
Nine is smaller than many of the numbers that the computer will one day count.

Something about sacrifice

I had written this a few years ago while I stumbled around my quiet house hold, preoccupied with explaining my life and interactions with inanimate objects through an objective, omnipotent narrator's perspective, rather than my own. All in the name of becoming a better writer...

Everything is an art form. To reach perfection takes time, thus, the greatest art we can hope to create is at the end of our lives. We are at the peak of talent when all previous experience has led to that point.
Sacrifice is also necessary; in sacrificing all life, our art becomes the pinnacle of all experience...

I still agree, looking back on the remote scrap of paper, now. And this is something rather new and relatively unrelated:

Think not
to dwell on dreary things
Since all we are and know
are to one day be lost
as with our memories.
Not to worry
what may be left behind,
for all those left with it
are all too soon to follow
what has gone before.