61 lines
1.8 KiB
HTML
61 lines
1.8 KiB
HTML
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---
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date: 2019-11-01
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weight: 5
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---
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<div class="verse">I'm no good at images, only words,
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and yet for days after surgery,
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as anesthesia and countless
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  milligrams, milliliters, millions of
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drugs leave my system,
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I'm lousy with visions,
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each lousy with meaning.
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I lay in bed, unable to move,
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struggling to keep my eyes open;
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I know that if I close them,
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  I'll be lost, I'll be lost, I'll be
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mired in waking dreams,
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coherent visions with all the logic
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of that paler side of consciousness.
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Perhaps the veil here
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is still too thin and vague,
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the pool too clear, the monsters too scary
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  too lean, too mean, too hungry, or
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perhaps I was too close to death
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to come away totally unscathed,
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too close to completely survive.
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  It's as though, laying here,
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  stinking of hospital,
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  I'm seeing emotions play out,
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    Scene after scene, scene after scene,
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  anxiety shown in heaps of discarded entrails,
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  hope in the ceaseless ratcheting of gears,
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  determination in the marching of feet.
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If I were an artist, perhaps
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I could hope to touch these images,
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but as it is, every word falls short,
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  too vague, too inexact, too tight to
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hope to explain something so vast
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by the very act of attempting to reproduce;
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I can only hint from the margins.
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That poetry can accomplish what prose cannot
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in its economy of motion
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is attractive to me, here in recovery -
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  so tired, so tired, so tired - so
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maybe I can hope to express the dire import
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of these visions dancing behind closed lids,
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or at least remind myself on rereading.
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Even now, a week out,
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I'm starting to lose touch with the visions,
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I can almost touch them if I squint,
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  lie real still, don't move now, but
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even then, a shadow of the substance...
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I'm starting to consign to memory
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that which was probably memory to begin with.</div>
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