dreamattack | a dialogue in pictures

Spring Giddiness

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

– Rumi

“The dance is a poem, of which each movement is a word.” - Mata Hari

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

– Rumi

the frustration.
the amplifying frustration.

like communicating in sign language to a hand in a sock puppet under water.

how can I explain to people, how can I help them to understand what it’s like in here, inside the bone box that crushes me from the outside in? my brain is the universe, it’s expanding - the separate parts of it, the areas that need to talk to each other - keep moving further and further apart. the spaces are filling in with a grey dirty cotton wool, with clouds, with pollution, with foul breath and stale air. all the electrical impulses have slowed down, all the neurological responses have slowed in tandem. people, my people look at me, their heads askew, not understanding why I am no longer capable. their frustration with me mounts - they do not understand. I look fine on the outside, the insides are scrambled, I come closer to the blade every day. their frustration with me is a highly-reflective catalyst. I am wholly aware of the decline, I am sitting in the decay - I know it well, and worse and better every day. when your impatience with my growing confusion peaks, it mirrors, it multiplies my awareness, it makes me ache with mental incontinence. it kills me a little more each day.

I visited a neurologist Wednesday. finally. he seemed very confounded. not a good sign. he ordered more bloodwork, an EEG (which involved several strange modes - strobe lights & auto-hyperventilation). he’s sending me for neuro-cognitive testing - which will basically involve a neuropsychiatrist determining just how much of my brain I have lost. I also (finally) have an appointment at the uams medical center neurology clinic. my dr. wants functional MRIs, PET, SPECT.

I don’t know how long this will take. I don’t know if I can last until they locate the defect.

sitting inside my decaying bone box, watching pieces slide away, wondering if I’ll ever get them back.

got my new canon g5 today, and buddha’s
doing a happy dance for me.

happiness is a warm, over-the-shoulders chestpack with a sleepy ferret inside it.

LVII

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e.e. cummings

A Life

Touch it: it won’t shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here’s yesterday, last year —
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like parade ground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.

– Sylvia Plath

it’s amazing how your day can suddenly spin on an icepick.

you’re enjoying the afternoon, slowly walking across campus to your car. you decide to take the “handicapped” ramp. you proceed down the ramp carefully, because you have been having serious difficulties with coordination and must walk with a cane so as to avoid falling on your face.

you hear the sound of rapid footsteps approaching from behind, accompanied by a twanging male voice that appears to be directed at a source somewhere inside his cellular telephone. you’re beginning to grow reluctantly accustomed to more able-bodied people with whom you are forced to share the campus. it still irritates the fuck out of you when people who are perfectly capable of opening a door give you dirty looks for getting in their way as they try to egress the ingoing auto door you are attempting to enter. you know the one, the one that has the giant silver button emblazened with that funny blue symbol that kind of looks like a wheelchair? you assume that symbol doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

so back to your beautiful October day. you hear someone approach behind you on the handicapped ramp. as has become habit, you attempt to scrunch yourself to the right so that the fast-walker/fast-talker can get by. apparently your ass is still too wide, because the fellow makes no attempt to squeeze by, but rather sweeps through you like a paper wall.

at first you think someone has actually HIT you.

the ground comes up to meet your hands and knees. the heavy pack strapped to you comes down to meet your back. the air is quickly forced from your lungs. the sky grows sharply cut stars as the metal railing whallops the side of your head. you look up, your eyes full of chirpy birds and question marks, expecting at least an apology but the culprit is already halfway across the parking lot. it looks like he’s even walking faster.

the pain begins to melt across your hands and knees. you instinctively glance around you furtively, hoping has noticed your embarassing sprawl across the sidewalk. your eyes meet with those of a young woman, hers dance with mocking amusement. “you are different, you are ridiculous,” they say. you furrow your brow as your eyes continue the swift sweep. the man who has been handing out small green gideon bibles for two days turns away, as if to pretend he didn’t see you fall. if he didn’t see you fall, he doesn’t have to stop handing out the word of god and help you, who politely refused his gift yesterday. “you should have taken a bible,” you can hear his thoughts from 20 feet away.

thirty-five seconds after impact, after you observe the rude and disinterested, strong and polite hands reach from behind, to help right you, brush you off, and assess your condition.

“what a jerk!” says the girl. “are you okay?” says the boy.

you mumble your thanks, flash a well-practiced smile designed to reassure people, and rub the tender lump on the side of your head.

“you should go see the nurse,” says the girl. “yes, the nurse,” echoes the boy.

more mumbled thanks, and a polite decline of assistance to the office.

as you hobble away, you have to stretch your face tight and lock your jaw to keep the tears in check.

I love autumn. fall. leaves. cool crispy weather. mother nature curling in on herself, withdrawing back into her insular womb.

I love it when my nose goes numb in the cold, freezing windburned cheeks. bonfire love, bodies moving closer together again.

I love the death of things, the beginning of the end of the cycle of life. knowing that renewal is around the corner. life is a circle within a circle within a square of chocolate.

I relish the melancholy listing of my mind at times. the swirl of days tinged with the slightest hint of sadness. it has always been true to my nature, and as a result, autumn has been the season in which I truly come to life.