Saturday, August 24, 2013

 Fire Escape

“Benzodiazepines and other GABA-acting medications remain essential to managing the stiffness and spasms of SPS. If these medications are withdrawn from SPS patients, the muscle rigidity can be over-whelming and fatal respiratory compromise may occur. Benzodiazepines are the treatment of choice for rapid control of SPS.  Although SPS is a serious potentially life-threatening disease, and some of the treatments have serious potential side effects; the course of SPS is variable. There are patients who, with proper treatment, are able to return to activities they enjoy.”

I wish you knew
I was on the pill,
well, many pills
mostly small and white,
here & there an oblong
one, or blue, maybe.


Anyway, I've been
this way since before
I started singing songs.
One day when I was
a kid my legs just
froze and the small
town doctors didn't
know what to do.  Of


course my mother prayed—
that might have
been better than the
myelogram or the x-rays
of my head--it was the 70's.
No one could
see into the body


the way they do now.
I've told you of icy dead
fields, where nothing is
greening at all.   Where I go.   

Where the hippy kids stretch
on sun-warmed
rocks in February


out in mossy river bottom flow
when the temp climbs
to the 40's in St. Paul,
in a little slip of woods
between the Lutheran
Seminary and the freeway.


I didn't have as much
pain back then.  I didn't
know there was a bleak
vaporous space
gathering in my muscles,
my thighs, my abdomen.


Once I was hit
in the head it was over.
I have many words &
memories still flow
like young hot semen.
But the blast of dying


neurotransmitters is controlling
my ropy muscles,
some tendons like glass
or brittle plastic.

Of disorder I can speak
of how the shade becomes

not a reverie but a scene
I can sometimes see
when my sight bends
and my muscles are as granite.
Beyond myself into a world
that exists without me.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

After the Seizure, 8/22/13, 1535hrs

No one's here.  Only
the cat and the crazy
dogs.  Foaming for
attention.  For food.
anything wild.  And I
am slipping into
the darkness, my
body is glass
my muscles are
like raw wet ropes.
I have not lost
but see only
the darkness in
me gathering
off and on like
violent little thunder
Storms.  I remain
your friend.  But I fear
so much those
episodes of pain
followed by emptiness
eating me alive.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Cartoon Reflections of a World Gone Wild

The first thing I must tell you
is that my daughter flew away
this morning.  We built her life
to be fine and free.
And then there's Oso, still

riding Mescalito everywhere
the old gods dwell:  high in
granite Rocky Mountain outcrop ceremony
or in the desert, eating bean & nopal
soup while blue

Slithers the sky.   While Rudolfo
sits wise as an old wolf watching
the city go by.  Still
in reach of the great
unwinding Milky Way.

I am here, in the late summer
heat drinking red wine,
trying to conjure Kerouac.
It's as simple as that—
for all of the loneliness

I've learned from my the poetry
there is nothing
as dark as the empty page.
And then there are those crackpots
Who think I've lived on stage.

Like a crazy Batman with bad
knees and the sadness of ghosts--
I sometimes wish I'd roast
In my own reflection, that
I am lord of the Night Sky

Lord of the Smoking Mirror
gazing deeply only to see
himself unwind like a widower
in the hallway, looking
for a light switch before the stairs fail him.