pain room

 

ANGEL OF MERCY

April 1, 2025
MEDICINE

I reach into
My angel’s apron

Their blister pac of medicine
close enough now

To the hour.
So small and so dense

It’s just enough. We call it
Self-defense.

 

 

ALWAYS ALWAYS BREATHE

This is a cross over piece for the Look show, Jimmy Bang Blues Project, and Listen Here.

SWEET OXYGEN BLUES
 
I find it hard to breathe (I tell you)
I find it hard to breathe
I find it hard to breathe (Lord lord)
why is it so hard to breathe
 
The words come heavy
My words come hard say say
My words come heavy
with what little breath I breathe
 
I find it hard to breathe
don’tcha look at me
I’m sucking I tell you
I find it hard to breathe
 
My wife and my children
My brother and my sister
You are the finest family
to love me and true me
 
my friends, my family
I should listen to you
you all bring me oxygen
one more time, singing
 singing our sweet oxygen
oxygen  blues singing we all sing
we all sing
the sweet oxygen blues.
 

Murray Toews – Bio 2022

Murray Toews is a “Deluxe artist” whose work spans the disciplines and media of writing, drawing, print, film, audio-art, interactivity and digital / analog hand-drawn animation that make use of thematic process-driven animation techniques that rapidly create animated shorts. He received a BFA first class honours degree with a thesis in advanced drawing from the U of M in 1992.

In 2004, he curated “Animator/Re-Animator” featuring Prairie animation with screenings in Canada and Japan. In 2012, his animated short Thought Camera, Reel One: “Circus of Objects” was the official selection for the NSI Online Short Film Festival and the 2013 Gimli Film Festival Manitoba program.

In 2018 he premiered “10 Years Before Happiness”- a subjective and allegorical autobiography seen through the youthful lens of intense emotion and surreality as he explores a personal landscape of shifting memory.

In 2022, he continues to produce and collaborate with a small group of talented cinematographers, writers, and audio artists to create short, animated and live action films as an independent artist and as the owner of an indie-driven media business called URBANSTICKMAN Productions.

PAIN IN MY NECK

I SCARE MYSELF[1]

Even with M keeping me in bed it’s dark after ten even on Canada Day. Deefer Dog is shaking between us until he’s not and the bangs stop banging. I start my journey into the night my body and my mind insisting on separate rips. I wake as my arm sweeps the tall lotions off the night table on my first pass, and see my arm dislocated, barely attached to my shoulder and twice as long. Second pass I get the water and nearly everything else, struggling into consciousnes with a deep affirmatiion from M to put up my side bed rail to corral my chaos just enough to let her sleep and stop scaring the dog.  

I scare myself when I scream ten out of ten and a pain generates upside my neck bending over to take off my fake leg. The aftershocks in pieces of my mind send me to the hospital emergency, but only when I throw in the cxrying towel a week later. Taken, and taken seriously for a brain CT scan and an appointment with a doctor at the TIA ( mini-stroke)clinic. The vascular neurologist shows me my brain, unremarkable except for as small mass on my third ventricle. My body memory choses the day my son had his mass in his fourtth ventricle removed in an eight hour brain surgery to press rewind replay remember I scare myself.

The neurologist does point out one of my arteries to the brain is narrowing. Meditarraen diet he says, eat more vegetables! I nod in pain. I breathe, again. Then he moves down to the scan of my cervical spine. “Oh, my,” he says as I want him to speak, “your neck is horrible, horrible!” Those words, the word horrible exact as much as anything in this world that scares me everyday I open  my eyes. My cervical spine curves the wrong way and the small tab-like disks have crumbled like feta. Still me, parts of my body scare me.

The pain I feel belongs to me, something I’ve held as my own since I was a child. Friends, relatives even doctors, exclaim, “no idea how you do what you do so much with all your injuries and ailments, you are absolutely fabulous! I wish I could have such an interesting life. Considering all your challenges you are  absolutely THRIVING.” THis is why I need a new psych, to build some prespective; reality checks sure, but ignoring the tempatation to fervently believe my achievements outweigh my pain.”

How hard it was and is, to explain to my families and friends that Icanbe in severe mental distress despite success dogging my steps. I am not worthy, I am unclean, I do not deserve to be let off the hook. So I dangle like a particple waiting for a psychistrist to take me down to listen when I scare myself.

Grace Paley writes: 

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come. 

They said, Really? 

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible. 

[…] 

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning. 

That’s a metaphor, right? 

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart. 

Talk? What? 

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember. 


The day he thought the weight of the world was on his shoulders, he realized it was his suspenders holding up his pants.

Let’s get one thing straight, this isn’t about the pleasure of pain sex. This is about the pain of pain. How much it hurts. This is where I let it all hang out, in dispatches from inside the pain room. We all have our own pain and suffering, and it seems woefully inadequate to be sending dispatches from my torn, aching body and brain, while thousands are dying in wars and famines around this world; noisily, I persist.

“Pain is always new to those who suffer, but loses its originality for those around them.”[1]

[1] Alphonse Daudet, La doulou: (la douleur), 1887-1895 (Paris: Librairie de France, 1930) p. 16; Julian Barnes (ed. and trans.) In the Land of Pain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) p. 19

 

 


BEDTIME ACCOMMODATIONS

Shrink sock on my stump
glasses on the night table
gauntlets on my wrists and forearms
mouth open meds riding
the water slide of my throat
mouth-guard so I don’t grind all night.

Richard Hines Photo

There I said said, a diaper around my bottom
like the cartoon of a New Year’s baby (just kidding)
my body a perfect vertical lie on the horizontal
line, music quiet and classical
temperature just past the click
parking lot lights on the ceiling
filtered by my apartment’s vertical blinds.

There is no you just me taking up
as much space as I can muster
your used to be pillow carries
your scent in the memory foam
while the clock counts down
the minutes needed to pass
over time before I can die.

written June 2020 revised Jan.5 2021

1 2 10

On a scale of 1 to (2) 10 where 1 is the least pain you’ve ever experienced and 10 is the most pain you’ve ever experienced, how much does it hurt? This line is asked repeatedly in the heath sector, especially in dealing with extreme pain, accidents, life threatening diseases, or trauma to determine the location and the extent of the pain.

Sunday November 5, 10:08

“the condition” by Charles Bukowski from WAR ALL THE TIME Poems 1981- 1984, read by Victor Enns

“suggestion for an arrangement” by Charles Bukowski,  from his collection WAR ALL THE TIME – Poems 1981-1984 read by Victor Enns

 

LISTEN DON’T LISTEN

09/02/2024

HÖRT NICHT ZU Gott du hast mir als Kind aus Wagen hoch oft gehoben. Die Engeln singen alle Mit Trost und Gedanken, du gibst mir nur eine Sprache zu lernen lachest du mir auf mein Eisen Baum so spuck ich in deine Augen! Du bist Ubu ubu ubu und mein Wieb sagt’s dem Hund Quit

... read more.

WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT

14/07/2023

FAIR CONTROL My psych understood I was after “fair control,” Understand my pain will never get better. Not ever, only intensity changes. Broken up prose like this might get to be a poem but now I am waiting for four pm and my next flight of meds.I’m in wine valley, though no more for me

... read more.

MANIFESTOS

04/07/2023

BREATHE Breathe. Deeply, hold it for three beats, exhale. Repeat. Three times. Breathing we all learned in choir, and when I was taking trumpet lessons, I was told how to stand properly and draw my breath from my balls. He was a Canadian Forces band leader. Our Mennonite choir director had more acceptable words for

... read more.

Coming Apart 141

30/06/2023

Remember when we say we can never step into the same river twice we acknowledge neither the river or ourselves, are the same changing every moment of every day.  My brain has come, is coming, will come apart any moment since I was poisoned by an “addictionist” last July 19. I know, I say, our

... read more.

SHOOTING HIS CUFFS

29/06/2023

WATCH   he has seen others do it for over a year or more do it turn their well-turned cuffs and close their hands over the buttons cufflinks, hear that hard not-to-hear hand-cuffs as you now see his partner across the table raise her brows asking if she can, no, may help him he drops

... read more.

Another bio

06/06/2023

BEST BIO EVER Victor Enns is a writer with disabilities who lives in Kelowna with his wife Michelle Hewitt, a disability rights advocate. Enns writes extensively on the theme of abjection as presented through his embodied differences. He has published five books (four since 2005); his work also appears in Grain, Cv2, Prairie Fire, Scrivener,

... read more.

WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT

31/05/2023

  July 14, 2023 FAIR CONTROL My psych understood I was after “fair control,” Understand my pain will never get better. Not ever, only intensity changes. Broken up prose like this might get to be a poem but now I am waiting for four pm and my next flight of meds.I’m in wine valley, though

... read more.

FALSE START 1 ish

29/05/2023

This is the official Look show reading. But not the book the book comes after, hope burns. Name calling has already begun in my brain. Pompus piloty pig. No This is the official reading for the Look show! Sounds better already doesn’t it. That’s another show I’m on about it’s called Listen Here which is formally

... read more.

THIS IS THE INTRODUCTION

28/05/2023

IMG_1118 Video Director and Camera by Jayden Ryga Written and Produced by Victor (I’m # U) Enns   WHERE DOES IT HURT? My stomach hurts, usually where I put my finger in this picture. The internal bleeding has stopped. I suspect a small bleeding ulcer developed by my anxieties preparing for the opening of the

... read more.

HOLDING ON

18/05/2023

READING A BOOK When I think I’m dying buying a new book is a commitment, only half-hearted since I downloaded it instantly for my e-reader and not for my own library shelf waiting for a diagnosis waiting for a prognosis sounds like (tug your ear) punch in the proboscis bury me not with any Bibles

... read more.

DEAD OR ALIVE

12/05/2023

‘The moment you tell someone you are sick, an element of doubt enters the conversation.” Source? KEEP THE RECORD STRAIGHT Nowhere does it say, “He almost died.” Let me fill that in for you.”I nearly died.”Ask anyone in ICU at 4 in the morning on Pandosy Street, and hour privileged by poets most famously by

... read more.

TIME IN MY HANDS

11/05/2023

“I am more of an existentialist the closer I am to running out of existence.” HE said.  Today is Thursday my computer tells me so. My colonoscopy is scheduled for Monday, the day after my wife Michelle has her MRI of her brain and her spine.  Wonder of wonders LOOK show has a few more

... read more.

CRYING BLUES

16/04/2023

Wrote this at least 20 years ago. Still happens. One of my depression symptoms that can be accommodated by presenting my reading as a pre-recorded video. One thing has changed though, I’m talking about it and have created LOOK show with the help of more than 12 artists,  opening April 29th in Winnipeg, funded by

... read more.

DOWNHILL SKIING

05/03/2023

from imaginary conversations Bruise You see this bruise? The one on your leg? Yeah that’s the one just underneath my birthmark. What about it? I got that skiing downhill at Innsbruck. You’ve never been to Innsbruck! You don’t even know how to ski. You try to convince my bruise of that! Where else do you

... read more.

MY PENIS

26/01/2023

My P***s Take 2 

... read more.

P is for Pear from The Abject Alphabet

25/01/2023

A is for abjection in my Abject Alphabet project by me, the mad phonetician. “A Poem of Pears” is a homage to Robert Kroetsch and his “Sketches of a Lemon” and his book The Sad Phonetician , which I was privileged to hear him read alive. There are a lot of alphabet poems recently the

... read more.

from “NOTHING TO SEE

08/01/2023

NOTHING TO SEE willowy orthopedist tends to (me) black and white negatives (screen) racked and raised above  my caregiver draws my orthopedist’s attention A flash of interest, then goes pro nothing to see there’s nothing to see her gaze swivels to my power wheelchair, as I chronicle my chronicity  including  depression hears my explanation differently

... read more.

from “NOTHING TO SEE”

07/01/2023

  IT DEPENDS WHAT YOUR DEFINITION OF IT IS It doesn’t matter. Yes it does. No it doesn’t. Yes it does. Why say it doesn’t matter. You know it does matter. So making a longer sentence makes it matter more.  No sentences don’t make it matter. Can you imagine a book without it. Oh, like

... read more.

NOTHING TO SEE

22/12/2022

  I badly wrenched my shoulder a couple of weeks ago and the pain kept increasing. There was another slip and a catch of a grab bar in the bathroom, and a forceful smack onto the top of the dining room table getting up and slipping my prosthetic foot  on my table napkin, and jamming

... read more.

O is for oxygen

01/12/2022

SWEET OXYGEN BLUES I find it hard to breathe (I tell you) I find it hard to breathe I find it hard to breathe (Lord lord) why is it so hard to breathe The words come heavy My words come hard say say My words come heavy with what little breath I breathe I find

... read more.

DIPPING A BUCKET IN COLD WATER

26/10/2022

I have been NO I am writing MANIFESTOS. I like to figure 5 is enough. Remember before capital letters were promoted to uppercase in keeping with the type room and styling type. Never you mind! I am up to five manifestos, would easily seem to be enough.  Listem. Breathe, Suffer, Desire, Suffer, and Love.  PERSIST

... read more.

MURRAY TOEWS

06/07/2022

I was fortunate enough to recruit Murray Toews as Visual Editor for Rhubarb magazine. He also contributed graphics, culminating in the 9 illustrations for each story in 9 Mennonite Stories, published by The Mennonite Literary Society in 2017. One email led another another email led to 100,000 thousand or more, and Murray bought extra storage

... read more.

PAIN IN MY NECK

02/07/2022

I SCARE MYSELF[1] Even with M keeping me in bed it’s dark after ten even on Canada Day. Deefer Dog is shaking between us until he’s not and the bangs stop banging. I start my journey into the night my body and my mind insisting on separate rips. I wake as my arm sweeps the

... read more.

HEART FELT

24/06/2022

Grace Paley writes:  “My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it

... read more.

A selection from my Archives!

04/06/2022

THE LETTER-WRITER “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me,” thought Moses Herzog.  Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself had doubted that he was all there. But n0w, though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant and strong. He had fallen under a

... read more.

THE PAIN CHRONICLES – RECOMMENDED

03/06/2022

I have just finished reading The PAIN chronicles cures myths mysteries prayers diaries brain scans healing and the science of suffering, by Melanie Thernstrom. It’s too big a book to read when you’re in pain. At 370 pages you’d probably be better off putting it on your Kindle or Kobo. Reading this book created that

... read more.

BELIEVE YOU ME

13/02/2022

MY ANGER AND PAIN MANIFESTO  There will always be someone who suffers more deeply, more righteously, more rigorously, more appropriately with higher levels of pain, with higher levels of accomplishment achievement than me like the amputee running a super marathon across the Sahara desert. Good for you. Good for God!   Me how do I

... read more.

JOINT HEALTH

04/12/2021

UPDATE Saturday December 4, 2021 WELCOME TO MY NEW NORMAL…. I’m getting a lot of my current circumstances out on my website today, and passing stuff along on Facebook. I believe I am the master of my own circumstances, which makes it easier to work and love. Our bodies and our minds are always changing…though

... read more.

BREATHING

BREATHING MY PAIN[1] WITH A SIGH   “As long as you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you.” Jon Kabat Zinn “What’s the secret of life? Always breathe.” Christopher Durang. Dad holds a piece of three-ply against the side of the brown and white Jersey cow. He hits the piece

... read more.

The Adventures of Augustine

22/10/2018

He wrote; I’ve changed my mind about Jonah, and about my mother because of a strange adventure, which occurred to me on the Island of Salamis. I was traveling back from x when we ran into heavy weather. I had taken a chance on a ship that would have me home sooner, but whose crew

... read more.

PHYSICAL HEALTH

28/03/2018

UPDATE MARCH 27, 2018 Good news and bad news. My blood pressure is a low 110 over 70, not unusual in our family, my father and brother the exceptions. It seems I arrived at my GP’s with barely a pulse. The doc checked the pulse in my feet, including the one that will be sacrificed

... read more.

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