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.

10/19

Watching my ticking pocket-watch.

It’s going too slow, I’m going mad. Not quite eight yet, can’t take my drugs and bask in their effects. Drinking Captain Eli’s, reading Jane Eyre, wishing I had a real beer, that I knew what the French ladies were saying — that’d be true gorgeousness.

Impossibilities, I’m crippled under hundreds of pages of text — for what reason? What’s the expectation anyway? My hands are trembling, my jaw is jerking, I want to scream confessions into the open air and onto deaf ears. I pretend play that I’m in a cafe snapping my fingers to the heartbeat of expression — no more apprehension, depression, or falling behind the imaginary pack.

Cliff Bar, too much sweet in my mouth. Just swallow the pills.

Untitled #19

Autumn. A distant smile.
Laughter accompanied by
receding attention.
Rain patters through the
open window. Friends
depart, each looking into
the other’s eyes, searching
for glistening feelings. She
stifles a cry from the swirling
void within her heart.
The front door opens, and
I leave alone to embrace the wind,
decades ago. Cold rain patters onto
my face.

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.

A Little Audacity

I am sleeping lightly upon a leather loveseat covered in blankets. In my dream, I am laying awake looking at my cellphone as it vibrates and rings in its little melody. Suddenly, I irk awake and look to my phone. Nothing. Seconds later, it rings. In the passage of one afternoon, this happens three times.

It is a few days earlier. As I cross the mighty Androscoggin river, I look to my left and wonder about the fate of the old Cowlan mill building. Contracts have fallen through and that historic landmark, now gutted, silent, and looming simply exists to uphold its own history — an icon of sorts for all the memories of the textile past. I know that it will not make it. Today, an inferno raged inside of the building and within the span of two hours destroyed all that was left. Floors caved in, walls collapsed into the river, the entire place came thundering down. Over 150 years of history was enveloped in fire, each year screaming as it died, sending fireballs and cinders from the building all over downtown Lewiston.

I pick up my pen, put it to the page, and then it falls over, leaving a sploch of black ink on the page. I am drugged with hopes of my condition improving, yet I have vomited almost everyday, and even water makes my stomach churn. I sit back, weakened by persistent fatigue, and imagine off into another place while my muscles lose their tone, while my body softens and my strength is undermined. I sit with a patch over one eye, too dizzy even to stand.

It is audacity that gets me through this. Boldness shielding an inner determination that strengthens my core, enlivens my willpower, envokes a sort of rage against all that is holding me back. My soul infuses with the whole of my body and I can conquer any obstacles that are presented. A little audacity is what keeps me alive through times when even reading is a challenge.

Each breath. Stronger.

Hrafn

http://tylernoyes.wordpress.com/

Meditating in the Attic

The room is quiet,
there is nothing here but
the silence of sacred candlelight,
the drafty air of an old New England
house, and that barely audible sound
in my ears when there is no other.
It is in this moment that
I can hear my beating heart,
feel the pulse of life within
my veins, wonder about all
those who have gone before me,
those who will go after;
within, without, they are all a part of me.
It is in this moment that I am alive.
Worry shimmers away into flames.
There is no need for merciful concern;
only peace is present here because
as I breathe, I nourish my soul,
and that is all that matters.

Drowsing Out Poetry

As of late, shifting among new medications and environments, the sudden workload of returning to college after a month off, the in and outs of the hospital hustle and bustle in a cognitively and physically excrutiating rush to get my symptoms under control, I have had much time to reflect and imagine. I might sleep for eight, ten, or eleven hours; none of it is enough to supercede the exhausting battle against epilepsy or the tranquilizing effects of medications. There is hope even here, in the place between drowsing and waking where reality doesn’t seem real, and my dream-consciousness is more awake than my own, and it is in the spirit of life. This poem is one of the many products my artistic drive has captured.

Untitled Verses While Waiting In the Hospital

My life is almost like in
those for-television-dramas:
the little boy is bald and
hairless and cancerous and
fighting for his life
in a medical ward in
some fictional hospital.
He draws with colored pencils
and speaks weakly to the
nurses and all their aides.
His smile is full of life but he
fears the condition that ails him
might be terminal; the concern in
everyone’s eyes might be
subliminal, but it’s there –
the raucous fear that flashes
inside of him like lightning,
takes his breath away,
stifles his spirit when
he most needs it.
Somehow, I’m different;
life is mostly merry and
the days are growing and good –
I, the patient, am still sitting here
wondering, wandering through
my thoughts like a human machine
transfixed on the organic world outside
my window. Flesh is an
anachronism here, a place of healing
where wires and blood converge.
My brain is no longer like the perfect vacuum
of outer space where theories and mysteries can
formulate, permeate, remain undiscovered when
the doctor shines his pen light into my eyes;
I’m plugged into the wall, a trendy
electric car, charging my batteries.
My sensuality is connected to electrodes,
connected to cybernetic nerves that pinpoint
and glimpse at every thought process
and heart-stopping, seizing suspicion of something
wicked yet to come, all fixed up among
my anxiety in the harmony colored electrical cables
that, in its empty inanity, looks almost like the stars.

Sojourn

Loneliness. The ends of the Earth,
where the semblance of spirits spoke
through her misleading smiles –
those glib threads upon which all
hope and integrity were suspended.

Along my path when I lost my way,
I was merry to meet a woman there.
The flicker of her sapphire eyes was
my burning beacon among the blur,
but the shroud of smoke had grown too
thick, the aroma of scorched Pitch Pine,
Ash and Elm too sharp, too unkind;
my fingertips touched only the mist.

Others’ company, the joy of man,
is but an augmentation of the dust.
There was a moment during the cold
blast of winter where I met her
again, wistful beneath a dark wool shawl,
and in the time it took for the
wind to drown out my quiet voice,
she faltered and drifted away with the
leaves and the snow into the
merciless swirling white that
looked a little bit like beauty.