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.

Progressive Soup Eaters

I am atop a screeching seesaw
teeter-tottering above not chasms
crags or cliffs but large steaming
bowls of condensed soup, and
rather than feeling the terror
of making a miscalculation or error
my dilemma is between the
tomato and the chicken noodle,
the salty and the frugal,
a crossroads of sorts where the
fork diverges the road for a long ways.
The cans teach me about the flavor of each,
the nutritional value and why I might
reach for one over the other, why
the seesaw ought to totter in one direction
or teeter in another – but I am viewing
this all too simply, for my bowls of steaming
soup are really two roads ahead of me that at
first diverge and curve along in their own,
snakey ways, crisscross across bridges between
people – places – but at the end come together,
anyway, in a way that makes my choice between a
tangy tomato and a chicken noodle with too
much noodle and not enough chicken
seem irrelevant, superficial.