WEBVTT

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I'd like to read a new
poem now continuing

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on this theme of language as a
means of control and salvation,

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at least that concept.

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In this poem, the persona or
the speaker has almost died.

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She's had a
near-death experience.

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And in the poem
you'll hear her trying

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to deal with that
experience through language

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and using language as a
defense, as a means of control.

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And the poem moves
on and eventually she

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has a moment of realization
about the limitations

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of language.

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Losing It.

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You feel a hardcore
blankness gain the upper hand

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while the world turns to
glittering silica, crinkles

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and rolls up like a
rented movie screen.

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The air whirs.

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Surely the golden fan
that halos saints' heads

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is rising from your spine.

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Before your lips hit the
floor, you recognize divestment

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and want to dicker, please
heaven with the slippage,

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but find yourself dismissed.

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Getting lost was once adventure.

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As a kid, you and a
kindly aunt played at it,

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boarding any bus that puffed
along no matter where it went.

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Your aunt was mindful
of the transfers

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which saw you home intact.

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Where is she now, with her
calm tokens and cerebral naps,

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when your brain's become a
Byzantine cathedral flooded

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with the stuff of
sump and dumpster?

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Its frescoes, memories confetti
into the mortal sludge.

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From domes filleted
and boned with light,

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the impounded soul looks down.

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You wake up dumb as
something fallen off a turnip

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truck into a new dark age.

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That petrified river around
your legs must be your skirt.

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What month, what day?

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The doctor asks.

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Mortified, you log the answer,
a book dense as a headstone

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to your lips.

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I don't know, you whisper.

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If brain were body,
yours would be unmuscled

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and standing in the buff.

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The ooze of stupefaction
extends for blocks,

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and you have nothing
but a single cotton

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swab which with to clean it up.

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Above the bed like a
silk in a filmy sarong,

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his head on a plate
of light, Christ

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sinks into a blue plush cross.

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Pain was never so fey.

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Heroic yet decorative, he is
the way we wish death to be.

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How well he embodies
our need for pleasantry.

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The oxygen is
delicious as champagne.

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You wish to express
this dim epiphany.

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You'd like to binge
on the fidgety past,

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but thoughts sigh slow as
elevators from cell to cell,

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and words, words
are snow crystals

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to be grown from vapor.

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Outside, the setting sun
dips a straw into the trees

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and drinks their green.

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This time you're lucky.

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You've lost nothing to speak
of, a contact, a way of seeing.

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And thinking back
on what happened,

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you imagine the brain
as Byzantine cathedral

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flooded with the stuff
of sump and dumpster.

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Its frescoes, memories confetti
into the mortal sludge.

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From domes filleted
and boned with light,

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the impounded soul looks down.

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Then you discard the flood
which was a kind of comfort,

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let go the pan-religious
romance of the soul.

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And what's left, a state
that's strictly -ex and -un.

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Not this, not that, the
ne plus ultra of losing

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track: a nothing
so engulfing I had

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to hide behind the second
person to address it as

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though I spoke of someone else.

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I remember my mother folding
my aunt's best blue pajamas

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on the empty drawer of her
dresser in intensive care.

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If there's a soul, it's
such a clingy rayon casing,

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deflating almost to absence when
creased in layers of tissue.

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From the high ground of
health and self-control,

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I issued orders to try.

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Her lids, pinned by ether,
strained as she complied.

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Squeezing her hand I hadn't
held since childhood,

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I wanted to forget myself
and beg her to awaken.

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Come back no matter where you're
headed, the voice inside me

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said.

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