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No Two Brains

2016-09-18-14-47-12

I went to visit my cousin in Philadelphia a week ago. As a way to stimulate my little nephew we took him to the Franklin Institute. He was asleep for most of our time there,  to our amusement, which gave us more time to enjoy the exhibitions engaging to both children and adults.

Halfway through our tour, we made it to the exhibition pertaining to the brain and all its processes. I spent a lot of time in there, given my condition with seizures. I couldn’t help myself from spending quality time in there, like I have in other brain exhibits. I had to fill that need to see what’s inside me, or better yet what’s the part that’s defective.It’s the parietal lobe, to my best knowledge, that’s affected. It may be the temporal but I’m not sure, it’s been years since I’ve gone through the medical reports.

There was one particular spot of the exhibit that was caught my attention, so much so that it triggered my instincts quickly. It was a physical representation of the neural pathways of the brain, but in this lit-up trip of a display that was climbable. So naturally, I climbed in.

 

 

It was clearly meant for smaller frames, but I said “fuck it” and went through the ordeal. As I pass through, I recalled all the times I’d think of how those rogue sparks in my head would start my seizures. Would they look like the way I’m latching onto the net, its steel a representation of neurons?

I stood at the top for a few minutes, looking down and wondering at the irony of having a seizure within the maze – I didn’t, thankfully. When I came down, I had a sense of relief and understanding, in that while I know metaphysically I was just completely up my ass at that moment, I saw what it felt to be the defect. And I didn’t hate it for that one moment.

 

Standard
Poetry, Writing

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

Standard
Poetry

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.

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