For the rest of my life

For the rest of my life, my unnatural natural life.
I am under a sentence.
Well, that much is obvious: life is a sentence of death, after all.
But can I bear this lot that is suddenly mine?
Perhaps I can (is there a choice?)
To be afflicted with something you cannot wish away;
Something to do with my 'self';
Something I would not wish on anyone.
I do not 'suffer' from epilepsy any more than I suffer from sleep.
Or breathing.

'It's all right Ma, I'm only seizing.'
If I believed in miracles I would feel blessed with the knowledge of being alive.
But self-knowledge begs the question: what is 'self'? What is 'alive'?
Whatever the answer, we take these as certainties;
'Eternal verities', if you will
But when you find the self you are is not the self you were,
All bets are off; all certainties squat.
'What am I?' is no longer such a stupid question.
Acceptance comes.
But slowly.

Still I forget, and then I remember,
Like walking into a dream, a nightmare of daytime unreality.
Where did it go, that forgetfulness, that naive somn-et-lumiere?
Ignorance is bliss, but unknowingness is epilepsy.
I want to forget; to swallow the un-bitter pills without thought
But I cannot forget; as though each pill is saying, 'oh no you don't'.
I cannot deny that which disables denial; nor deny disability.
Denial has a price: amnese this and risk missing the pill.
Remember this or remember nothing.
Except fear.

Memory is a part of life that comes and goes,
Like the wind or tide. We lose a name of a familiar face
Or recall the outcast kid we shunned in school thirty years before.
Crossword puzzles keep mental reflexes sharp, they say.
Perhaps the poet's way is as efficacious.
If we are cast away on a desert island, would we revert to animal?
"Take a letter, Miss Jones" and throw it in a bottle into the sea.
Will the wind and tide then return it to me?
Memories in a bottle tossed on a synaptic sea
Is life.

Top  ¶ 9:19 pm