Poem #1: How I Felt On Learning I Have Epilepsy

How does a caged bird sieze?
How may a sleeping dog lie truly at ease?
This incurable, unknowable, syndrome-not-disease
Quietly sits
Within my 'spheres,
In wait to cause fits
For the rest of my years.

It did not enter my head
That the rest of my life
would revolve around 'meds'.
So what? What is the deal?
Unseen, unfelt while I slept,
It was hard to make real;
Still is hard to accept,
Living in dread of an attack,
My family knows better:
Me, gripped on a wrack,
An ictal bed wetter.

At first I thought this could not be,
It just could not happen to me.
Then I saw an EEG;
The spiked frequency
Became a thing in me.
But the alien was me.
And I asked, 'why me?'
Why do I have epilepsy?

What terrible die were tossed,
What die was cast,
What gamble lost,
What dye stains my myelin fast,
L-DOPA? GABA? Oh please.
Query: when will it seize me at last?
And when my mind it finally frees,
What then, do I die, I ask,
As the homophones suggest I must?
As like as smoking ten a day,
I.e., too soon I am dust
(So the statistics say),
Or, with synapses fried and a shambling gait,
Will I a burden to my family be?
Or will I lie in vegetative state,
A burden on the whole of society?

How did I feel? I can't precisely tell,
There was hopelessness and fear.
And anger as well.
Epi-lep-tol-o-gist? Oh dear!
'Epileptographer' at best is about all
Such deserve to call
Themselves for all
They really know.

Yet the physicks were not to blame
For the plague (nor the postmen for the anthrax).
Angered there is no one to blame
(But myself perhaps?),
I fell to self-pity
And longed to be alone
With my own self-enmity,
A millstone of my own.

This is no divine blow.
When I go, I go.
My self is under siege
When my 'self' sees fit to seize.
What in the grey matter has happened to me?
I just don't know.

november 2002

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  ¶ 9:11 am