(An answer to the Hope Portal question of How do you feel Hope in your body? Which I answered first as how I have felt despair in the body. This relates to living with MS, a progressive disease with no cure)

My body failed me.
My fingertips itched to move across the broken keys.
But my right hand could not keep up with the left.
The thoughts are made but do not go through.
The disconnect.
This thing I have loved suddenly so far from view.

My body failed me.
I try and keep up.
But you are too far ahead.
The rhythmn of my feet becomes uneven.
Like a blues shuffle.
The right foot cannot keep up with the left.
I drag it along.
I am unbalanced.
Unsteady. 
I try to hide it.

Somewhere around a mile and a half
My gait falls apart.
My ankle unexpectedly turns.
I catch myself before I crash.
I am on my own but not very far from home.
I keep going.
What else is there to do?
I make it somehow.
Just in time to reach the bathroom without pissing myself.
Small blessings?
I sit for the remainder of the day.
Exhausted by what I used to take for granted.

My body fails me around 11:30.
I have work that needs to be done.
The laundry never ends.
People need to be fed.
I need to go to the store.
But I know exactly how much it will cost.
I hesitate.
It may be the only thing I accomplish today.

I have nightmares where you are drowning
And I watch hopelessly from the shore.
You sink below the waterline.
My body fails me once more.

As my body fails me
My mind races ahead.
(I wonder when that might fail me too)
I will not live up to the promises of my dreams.
There I am still climbing an Impossible Mountain.
A steep incline.
Sweet pine and scree.
The fragile mountain air.
And the mountain laurel.
everything starts to fall away.
The physical world shrinks from my grasp.
But I remember existing there for a pass.

And I read about it in books.
And I am peering through a screen.
This is where the path leads.
I am looking at your woods.
And walking miles in my mind.
Impossible stars.
There are still things left to find.