Sestina!fic #1: House post-infarction

So those sets of six prompts I requested back in September? The big secret is that I've been playing around with some sestinas. (Yes, I am that much of a geek.) For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, it's a type of poem consisting of seven stanzas where the same six words appear at the ends of the lines in a different order in each of the first six stanzas, and then two of the words appear in each line of the final three-line stanza. There are more rules -- Poets.org explains in detail -- but that's the gist of it. That may sound confusing, but once you read one you'll get it.

Irony of ironies, of the five poems I've got going for the first round (four House, one Harry Potter), I ended up using only one full prompt set from what everyone supplied, plus a few words scattered here and there. Since I'd never written poetry!fic nor a "normal" sestina before, it was easiest to write with simple prompts closely related to the characters. If you gave me prompts, don't be disappointed -- at least one set from everyone will be turned into a poem or ficlet.

ETA: For the poetry-phobic among you: It's non-rhyming, and it reads like a story. There are just line breaks in odd places and a lot of repeated words.


Okay! First one up:


Character: Gregory House
Rating: R for language
Word Count: 450
Prompts: painkiller, Stacy, fuck, nerves, dead, laugh
Spoilers: "Three Stories"
A/N: To quote Eddie Izzard, the infrastructure's fucked. In other words, screwed up the order on this one. But I liked the stanzas enough to leave it alone.
A/N 2: A University of Northern Iowa webpage mentions the obsession that underlies the sestina because of its constant return to the same words. I think that's what makes this form so fitting for House.

( Being crippled against one's will is in fact worse than being dead, he concludes. )

Feedback is love. That includes concrit. Considering there will be more of these, advice on what works and what doesn't would be appreciated.