(This poem was written not long after my being diagnosed with severe Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) in 1996. For those unfamiliar with MCS and who haven't visited my 'Island Place' website it is also known, in its more severe form (like mine) as being allergic to the 21st Century. Exposure to the minutest amounts of of a wide range of modern manmade chemicals will trigger severe and sometimes quite violent, debilitating and disabling, and potentially damaging reactions. People with MCS (and there are a huge many of us) are effectively shut OUT of the modern world. It is a highly toxic place in which they cannot long survive.

The picture you see allows you to see the world as you see it (top) and through my eyes (bottom), damaged by the chemicals which gave me MCS. I have better days but it is never as it use to be. Eyesight problems like this are common among MCS'ers.

There is no cure for MCS. As far as they can tell the damage that causes MCS is irreversable.)

If you should glance outside your door
You may chance to see me pass.
Walking the lonely fields of my cell,
With its ceiling of blue and carpet of grass.

If you should venture out this way
You may visit me in my prison.
With its gossamer walls and vaporous guards,
Deadly warders just beyond your vision.

You are free to come and to go,
To visit, or not, as you will.
While I must stay beyond your door,
Captive to the vapours that kill.

For I am in, or I am out,
The Inside Out Prison of mist,
That stealthily stalks your corridors
Bringing woe to those it has kissed.

But the Inside Out Prison has many cells,
With prisoners to numerous to list.
And here we must stand calling to you,
For those in the grave can't warn of the mist.

And so I pace the fields of my cell,
With its ceiling of blue and carpet of grass.
But I thank my Lord that I can still walk
And weep for those that fall to the gas.
D.J. Ludlow Copyright 1997

(From the "Life Lines" Anthology)