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The Absence Epic, 4
23.
“You feel weak, but I still think
you’re the strongest man I’ve –“
it’s dark and I am sitting in bed,
three attacks in two hours
“You’re the bravest –“Shut up,
shut up. This is no daring here
this is primal survival, walking
in the woods of the city making
sure the cars don’t run me over.
“You can do this, you have me – “
no one is enough to fight this,
just me and the absence, anger
the desperation, and my tears
24.
This is not genetic, there is no curse
tied to the ATCG worth passing on
to a child, in my future, I will hold
scared to death the seizure drops
The fluids show it is not cancer, no
panic then, you are healthy (sort of)
keep true to your smiles no matter
how you hide them, or slip away
Photosensitivity free, lucky for you
there is a light at the end of this
tunnel unlike for the rest, but recall
the absence, when it hits, breaks you
25.
I walk out the building, hood up, monstrous
The homeless of the Tenderloin and I share
a certain shame and resiliency this morning
These streets know not the steps or pattern
of the brain waves hunted by the sensors
married to my head, held in holy bandage
There is no consummation – humiliation,
perhaps — but I want to lay in bed, alone
my head held high in hope of the sign
from on right-brain glitch to nodes,
the heavenly disconnect of my senses
to the tech – one cord, from monitor
to temporal lobe, temporary, lonely
26.
The talismans are wrapped on
a string around my arm, wrist first,
penitent. Why did this happen?
What ties did I break that made
this condition my faith, my body
its sole temple and priest?
To the forearm, and the threads
become tenuous, protective
to the shivers in a blind animism
where all my will would rather
stay with frayed elder strings
than unbound to the seizures
The bicep, where there rests icons
misused saints I used to pray to
but stopped – now, I whisper
small phrases to them as auras
move past the shoulder towards
a flux – divine, wicked, unknown
27.
I will remain the man shaking violently
Even at 90 and the last flicker of light
When my daughter stops calling me
As I see my wife go into the ground
After I see my child’s eye for the first time
Before “I do” leaves my mouth in May
The last time I’m allowed to go to a festival
Tonight, writing this in fear of my future
Despite all the control and safety from pills
28.
There is one maxim to learn, after all these battles
when I have hyperventilated into angel’s trumpets
refusing the touches of careful women saving me
from the midnight fear and morning complications
finally facing complexity, embracing my absence
until my body turns into the predictable maelstrom –
Breathe, Just
Breathe. You
Will Weather
This Storm
29.
Yes, there is no particular ending to a seizure
The waking up, the consciousness resumes
and we are once again left in this universe
on fire, white hot or slowly burning lethargic
But we will not let the black and blues define
us, we will take the bruises and the pain
as signs that, yes, we are still here, fighting
the ghosts that refuse to let go of our brain
And we will push our bodies, just as they do,
until we become heavenly, orbiting, unlimited,
drifting with hope that we will meet each other
And I will finally remember all of our names
The Absence Epic, 3
16.
No rest for loud thoughts.
Stay up alone? No, savage
fits destroy my words
17.
Roses and fire that prick
my fingers and arms
Sight is a luxury slipping
into my ruin on repeat
The ashes, I will not let
them choke me down
It does not have the right
to leave me here, alone
And nobody truly aware
that I am hurting inside,
dragged into a spiral
of thorns and flames
I feel but cannot see
18.
Let’s go far away where the shivers won’t scare me,
my body reacts at the contact from phantom winds
I want to see the bay and the dark sky, the stolen
mix of highways and comfort in masking absence
This may be the only road I see out of this trip
where my world is lost when lights become auras
19.
Triggers create threats, a stream of scattered havoc
springing out from the ether and breaks of emptiness
Triggers bring flames and flames on the walls my hands
are banging against – no burns, only wide-eyed fear
Triggers create memories, displays and a pageant
of frenzies I portray in front of you, my dear
Triggers sit tight, for they live inside and around me
watching for a time and place to grab my hands
20.
There you are, taking off your dress, a smile
slight yet bit-lip enough it washes cautions
held every time you saw me fall into space
and caressed me in the post-seizure haze
This is the moment I hold you down, hard
onto the sheets and say “Fuck the fear.”
I have touched you there before and loved it
My thoughts, I shut down with a tongue –
a flurry of strokes and moans and I am free
But, in the sex and switched postions It returns.
The damn thing was hidden between the thrusts
and the command “Keep going, don’t stop,”
I follow the wrong gypsy, the cursed one
who puts her spell on me, the impossibility
of an orgasm when my body forgets its place
21.
All these mind-fires burn what was the old me,
a blaze in the last bonfires of a cold beach
I see, in the inner effigy there is hope left
If I use the ocean – I see it there, the waves
of the new coast calling to me in a new tongue
What is there left to do but to lean back,
let it crash over me, wash the flames away
and ready my mind for the new self, waiting?
22.
Hi, I am your lungs contracting at rates of complexity
per seconds, blinking faster, your words on remix
Ven aqui, compadre mio this won’t end ‘til you chill,
‘til you die, ‘til the shivers go away happy once they
ate away at all the quiet air you had left in the day
The Absence Epic, 2
9.
The zephyr came, blew the breeze into the flame,
the searing halo I cannot put out – it knows me,
how my wrist is held by the hands of petit mal dames
playing tricks, sprinkling embers on my ear and nape
The wind and the fire crown made me a wicker man
made from sticks of an origin that, had I known existed,
I would have thrown into the sea, along with my body,
but the omens never help – they always want a sacrifice
10.
Too small, the pills fall away under the stove,
My stomach numb, it gnaws and churns
But all I feel are my knees scraping on the tiles,
My arm reaching – clean, dirty, depending on
How my skin reacts, or if my arm will light on fire
I sense them and let the panic subside
They are in my hands and I am safe for now
The slow damage is eating away at me already
The pills are on my desk now – they are already gone
11.
An instruction manual –
First, let me go, you know
my struggle and need
no obstacle for the writhing
Second, when I am turned
to the side, hope to god
I remember I can make it
through the next few hours
Third, my heart is a knot
tightening from the absence –
I will loosen it, do not worry,
She will come eventually
12.
There is no water here and I am still drowning,
sound of voices muffled in and out by the wake
I am passing through choppy consciousness
treading thoughts, barely, lying and floating
words between polite dinner and brief liquor
My lungs are filled with panic and swimming
to sure smiles and standing, what my legs
refuse to do, are meters away from rest
13.
I fell on the subway on route to a party
chatting with a woman against a pole
The aura formed the swell in my head,
my body is surfing on the turns of the train
The idea of my location is irrelevant now,
the direction is a hope I do not pass out
She keeps talking, I stammer, I-
-I-
-I-
Wipe out
Here comes the EMTs
14.
I sank and felt the mind blast
Maybe this would be the last,
Or not, who knows – the tank
Is empty, where I think, grow
fantasies and the average shrinks
This crash of faulty brain staggers,
A battle of flash fires on grey matter,
Home to silent pains while I assault the
Absence, until I tire, barely breathing
And then, seething, return to the fray
15.
My sick head spills out the boundless ambitions in my dreams
face down, profound and abstract, a thousand years a second
shattered when I am awakened by your attacks. I need sleep,
take in Nyx’s breath and whirl in the night’s missing pieces.
I am not alone in the bed – the absence, the complexity
make a trio of nightmares and verges of night terrors
so predictable, I want to snuff them with all my pillows
but they leave, as always, lying to me they won’t come back.
I want my dreams unending, and to this day miss its haze.
The Absence Epic, 1
I decided that, this year I would make the attempt of running the National Poetry Writing Month gauntlet. I have something that is helping the journey – my seizures.
Short story: I was diagnosed with a seizure disorder in early 2009. I have it under control luckily, but I do have the occasional bouts of absence seizures. When those started coming, sometimes I’d jot down whatever the hell my clearly messed-up brain was coming up with.
As the years have passed, I’ve decided that one day I would write those pieces into something larger. At its current incarnation, I am calling it The Absence Epic. I’ve posted the first week-plus’ worth of poems (0- 8) on Instagram, Tumblr, even the old DeviantArt daily. However, I decided it would be here where I would put the poems weekly. So, here is the first week. I have no idea where this will go, and how many of these will actually stay in their current forms.
0.
In my dreams, forged from mother’s stories of that day,
I see pieces of the infinite, supernovae and flares,
Planets I did not know the names of at that time.
As a child, I gave them titles of my choosing.
Now, when I wake up, I know their true names,
Losing all memories of the ones I gave them.
I wish I could remember their names every morning.
1.
I am litter on the floor, eyes open,
Bent, twisted turned as a crumpled can.
The only thing that holds me are drunks
called friends and freaked out passersby.
There is no stopping the absence,
the fear of staying asleep in my mind
forever with the memory of a mind on fire,
a pain deep, rending me comatose.
2.
How do you give a voice to a silent rumble? Do you fall,
convulsing, attempt and hold it together, failing,
is it
…just…wait…
…stay here and grab my hand…
…this absence is all I have left.
This absence is all I can leave behind.
Please, let me leave it behind
Please –
3.
I spin out, wheels without,
feet on the ground
with no direction
I feel the pins from within
rip through the epidermis
harder than the sound
I walk in haze, mind ablaze
but stumbling is better
than giving up to delirium
4.
I met the complexity the follows me
Now that cold morning in Lima,
And it rested within me, patiently,
Waiting to be reborn, for decades
We did not shake hands, or kiss,
But I will tremble to its control
The maturing deformation,
The real pain? I feed it to this day,
As it is my new and everlasting muse –
Not the women, the anger, nor the drink,
Just the absence, and it will always be
At my side, eternal, until I blink into dust
5.
No activation response for my senses
my head is taking in cold breaths –
I cannot allow
disappointment,
a breaking point –
but the chill seeps in
and under red storefront lights, I align
my shame with growing suffocation
6.
I fear the sliver between
awareness and the great abandon
Within that crack lies a beast
that gnaws on my left arm, caressing
my head, anticipating a devouring
of my direction and spitting me out
into open neuroses, disintegrating me
I will fill that space between myself
and the crack, or the crumbling begins
7.
I should make it my muse,
its touch moving my fingers,
writing in its trembling diction
of stammers and repetition,
the quiet chant of reticence,
the hymn of failed resistance,
the melody of sweet absence
ascendant where disorder lingers,
and scattered divisions that it chooses
8.
No joy, just presence and memory,
a constant night breeding a will to drift
into the “what ifs” and “who’s to know”
that I am in persistent loss of control
and that my fears are fed powerfully
