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 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/

Nineteen days and then some

I am on an extended break from my university with months ahead of me, free from just about everything but idleness: no work, no class, no plans.

I never realized how tiring nothingness can get. Days are insignificant – even weeks are depraved of their meaning. I was told that it was a big day on this coming Thursday and that I had plans – I wondered what they were and then realized my birthday, another insignificant event. Business for one day, then idleness for the rest of the spectrum of summer.

When I lay down in a lounge chair outside, or simply collapse and sprawl out on the grass or on the wooden planks of the deck, basking in sunlight, it feels like there is something to do. I then realize there really isn’t, and drift guiltily on into a nap or my thoughts.

Wayfaring will eventually start eating up some of my time, and getting on my bicycle and travelling around the lake, perhaps writing, reading, and music, too – nevertheless, there is a drone in the back of my mind at all times that speaks of lazy summers, of going into the woods for the sake of punching out old, punky and rotten trees, of weeding Japanese knotweed and watching carefully, day by day, by basil grow large enough to make it on its own in the garden. Perhaps poetry will spread its roots amidst all this fertile, tilled soiled.

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.

Day Shift

I forgot to consider today,
today, and was left thinking about
tomorrow, yesterday,
or ten thousand tomorrows
yet to transpire.

It’s easy to forget about time
during a hot shower or in the
impatient moments waiting in
bed for my body to fall asleep
and look dead for a little while.

I think about the future too often then
and about the person I am going
to be on this cusp of becoming.
But they are thoughts of inanity;
Why imagine the goodness yet to come
when I am living in a goodness presently?
My dreams are merely my existential Aspirin
until I breathe them, seethe with them,
make them my heartbeats,
make them my own.

A man pushed his lucky penny across the table one
day and assured me that only three moments
my life mattered. My birth, my death, and the
moment that is utterly, precisely now.
I took an urgent breath, then
he snatched his penny back.

-hrafn

Untitled #12

He falls into sleep with the softness of a whisper,
his time of anomalous existence where nothingness
takes shape as dreams and images that shelter him
between life and the delicate truth of brooding death.

Behind closed eyes he watches me move to
either side like a silent sentry and I begin to
wonder what it’s like to be in his dreams,
to ponder the places he has been and the
people that exist only within his mind.

I sit, and shadows lift from my armchair in the corner
when the sun rises from its slumber and washes
away the dark presence that follows with the night.

The light strikes his eyes twice and at once he awakens,
his limbs no longer numb and void of life.
His somber eyes, glistening blue and white,
affirm his humanity again for fourteen hours;

I smile behind my worry and he witnesses
the loving sentience of his grandmother and the
steamy aroma of black tea and our breakfast on
a cold winter morning.