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 If these medications are withdrawn from SPS patients, the muscle rigidity can be over-whelming and fatal respiratory compromise may occur.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.