Last Friday I received an email from Split This Rock containing this poem:

After reading it I immediately pulled out my notebook and a pen and started writing. I wrote my own version of a love poem,  which centers around my headaches. This isn’t the first time an email from Split This Rock has inspired a poem, and I doubt it’ll be the last. But what’s interesting is the last poem sent out by Split This Rock that really moved me was about chronic pain, something I am all too familiar with. As I’ve said before, my pain comes in the form of headaches so brutal only the strongest of pain killer can take the edge off. Thankfully, the medicine I’m on works well and keeps the headaches contained but it’s a constant source of frustration for me. I’ve had four neurologists over the past seven years and none of them can come up with a diagnosis more concrete than “atypical tension headaches”. They don’t know what causes them but they know I’ll have them the rest of my life. A couple years ago they discovered a lesion on my brain, which I named Napoleon, but it turns out that was a coincidental finding – it isn’t causing my headaches and it’s just fine, provided it doesn’t start to grow, then I’ll have to deal with it. But for now Napoleon just hangs out in my brain, a tiny little thing that isn’t yet trying to conquer me.

Napoleon, my brain lesion

I’m not usually a love poem kind of person. It’s not my style or taste in poetry, yet one of my favorite poems I’ve written is Love is a Lesion on Your Brain, which is essentially a love poem to my husband. After reading Sholeh Wolpe’s poem I wrote this: