11/8

I have a drug addiction — perhaps it does not seem like it on the outside to those unknowing onlookers, but what I desire most is an end to the seizures (the spells, the episodes, the visions).

Drugs make that happen, at least for awhile — hard drugs, not by traditional standards, but enough of them to be measured in grams per day, intense enough to keep me in a perpetual, paradoxical high, a great slowdown of the mind.

My waking, striking eyes are always in struggle against the tremendous forces of the anti-epileptics; yet, I feel when my body revolts, when it speaks to me and says for me to rest. I do not lest, for as the busy world goes, each day closer to strangling itself in the global chains and wires of its norms and infrastructure, about to keel into cardiac arrest, so too do I follow and drift in a drug-laden stupor, hallucinating dim images of future success and liberating peace among this catastrophe.

Sleep is never enough to shake off the effects, no matter six, ten, or twelve hours — it is a waking coma that I am in, unable to fight the burden from my consciousness.

A dream during twilight

She bears a burden that chills her heart,
takes away the aches and pains,
slows the rhythm of life to the minimal
pulse excited only by alcohol and running
away from fear, fear of solutions to what seem like
indelible problems yet are as evanescent
and fleeting as fireflies.
Her body becomes colder and her frozen breaths
can’t sustain her for much longer.
Her warm appearance is unlike that which lies within;
while perhaps thoughtful, calm and capable of true
acts of humanity and love, she is as broken and twisted trees,
mangled not of their own accord,
yet still holding with a firm grip on to the power of life
through each brittle winter that howls and roars to claim.
It will take a year of working,
a year of sun, fertile rains and the
loving being of all that is, but she who
once stumbled in the frigid dark and
grasped blindly for a hand to hold
onto may know herself as herself,
alive and empowered –
nothing trivial, not any more.

Desert Wakes Up

The expanse of lights fills up my vision;

I am awakened flying higher than Phoenix and

in the darkness of midnight I recognize no one

in the deserted city. We descend and drive through

the dark blurry streets that criss-cross the city’s wings

and soar on towards death in the Sonoran Desert.

The landforms that took a hundred thousand years

or more to form are recreated in sterile plastic for

a passing travellers palms to pass over, the palms’

leaves void and disperse the city lights in shapes

of sharp feathers out across the through-fares.

Beneath, the dark asphalt approaches the Colorado Plateau,

and begins the ascent out from

this endless circus of fiery lights.

The mimicry of a heart quakes beneath this city,

frightened, sustaining a thousand new refugees

each month — yet in a hundred years this place, fated

to become a wispy dune, will be a stronghold only

populated by dusty metal bones and mummified memories

of life, cracked and dried like those in Pompeii, trapped

in eternal gridlock for a drop of water, a drop of life.

There is oblivion outside my window as we drive the

steep mountain passes away from the immortal city.

Only phantoms of people and cars roam the street;

hope is  rumored to be forlorn, the grace of the modern city

is about to spontaneously combust –

and as the old desert sun rises and gives hot breath to a new day

I can see the ravens playing in the burning crimson light.

Epitaph for Bill

There was a little boy that lived under the stairs of the Old Church east of the river of St. Peter. He enjoyed dancing and running to the shores to play with the debris that would wash up from the coal-fired mills up the river a ways. We thought his name was Bill, but when we talked to his mother – the homeless woman that walked around town digging through dumpsters – she told us all along he’d been fooling us and that his real name was Bill. We knew she was under the influence and underwater in her mind so we smiled and kept walking with Bill, listening to his stories of imaginary friends and fantastic places that he visited in the park day after day: a dragon named Carly, a friendly ox named Joseph, and even a little girl named Rita. He told us of adventures we wished we could participate in again, of places we’d visited before but couldn’t anymore. We were adults and adults couldn’t play games, only politics.

My husband and I found Bill one day laying down in the grass near the swings at Arden Park, in his usual spot. A little girl with a dirty face and a dirtier, faded dress stood over him smiling and laughing while he told story after story. A great writer he’d grow up to be, we knew. Bill was the son we’d never have, in his simple innocence. He didn’t go to school and the state really didn’t care, he was just some homeless boy with autism. Nobody cared but us.

Last winter when we were walking home from our underpaid teaching jobs at Morrill High School we saw Bill standing by the riverside holding scraps of cloth around his body, shivering. The icy waters had nearly frozen but kept flowing, resisting the change of winter, the death of motion. Bill passed a final smile to us and jumped into the waters, yelling of adventures Sir Galahad and Lancelot were leading him on, into the great depths below where imagination roamed free and death never bothered. Bill floated still and silent in waiting, into his greatest adventure.