Revised November 21, 2023
It’s been about a month since I’ve been active on my website, and a long time since I did anything more than repost memes on Facebook. I, there is that horrible work again a work in progress, word, could be (a new book by George Bowering) because I’ve finished a 170 page manuscript, a hybrid including writhing (leaving it in) that looks like prose, monologues, dialogues and yes a lot 0f stuff that looks like poetry.
The shortest so far is this
TABLE FOR TWO
I sit down with pain.
It eats me.
My body weighed in on how much my work at a desk (oh, stop! I tried to increase my daily step count but my back won’t stand for it!) and bending my knees. I have two of those, just not the left leg below there need because pain can be that bad, hurt so much you’d rather have a prosthetic. I’m worried my artificial hips are showing wear and tear after 10 years, but the pain in my red knee, might be helped by a sound wave therapy. That would be my right knee. That would be better than amputating the leg above the knee woe doggies!
But what really hurts me the most right now and has for months is my right shoulder and my cervical spine, depicted on the X-ray. We persuaded, that’s me and my wife Michelle Hewitt ( a disability rights advocate), my GP the time had come that only an increase in my Suboxone would push the pain back into the station. We’re working on it, and I’m feeling an improvement, but it’s not like the ointment, salve? Diclofenac that kicks in just minutes after the topical has been applied. My body is recalibrating, to the new dose.
A reminder I need myself sometimes, that I nearly died just 16 months ago. My body is still recalibrating. LOOK show was exhibited in Winnipeg with Murray Toews at the helm of a large crew, 12 artists responded to my writing, whatever moved them, and sometime me dropping in images that I saw with stunning outcomes last week in April 1st week in May. I bailed. Mental Illness, with a capital I among my less visible disabilities, coming with OCD and chronic depression with anxiety, especially performance anxiety, sir I tell myself, not being there was another exhibition bit another part of the show. It’s not quite finished, we’re putting a program catalogue together delayed also by my delays, and Murray is moving forward with the virtual gallery. I could be working on that.
So 600 words, new words
And I revised this poem again.
Revised after lunch, October 5th, 2023. I caught the cut my editor suggested and have accepted it here. Much improved. Thanks Don! Fair control was introduced into my vocabulary and understanding by my new found psych in Kelowna.
FAIR CONTROL
My psych understood I was after
“fair control,” not opioids to feed
an addiction. This means understanding
my pain never goes away. Broken up prose like this
might get to be a poem someday
but now I am waiting for four pm
and my next flight of meds. You can
tell I’m in wine valley, though no more
for me since I chose to have surgeons
cut off my left leg below the knee five years ago.
I take the lowest dose of Suboxone
that gives me fair control so I can
keep the chocks blocking the pain
from getting on the plane,
med enough for fair control to free
free my imagination/ be real, you mean
free your hands your arms and every joint
to make it possible to sit and tell the story
about what ails me one finger at a time.
that’s me I’m talking about snapping suspenders
and climbing aboard my gravity defying
writing machine and fly fly fly.