Brain Zaps!

PM MMXXIII

Brain Zaps

I awoke from a fitful sleep,

hardly a sleep,

more like a twenty minute nap

punctuated by nightmares

and sweats.

The sun had begun to rise,

Hemingway was right,

and as I rose

I felt the electricity

pass through a synapse in my brain,

threatening to send me back

to dreams,

where the wild things are,

changing my room back into a primeval

jungle, even though nobody

can hold back my dinner if I am bad.

I find myself enjoying the shocks,

self-imposed electric shock therapy,

involuntary and uncontrollable.

Who is holding the paddle,

controlling the watts,

who decides what needs to be erased

ad what needs to be remembered,

I have no dialogue with this entity,

yet I know them so well

and I am afraid of them.

They know too much

and they use it against me when I am

at my nadir,

wondering why I reached this point

I ask the wall and I ask my cat

but I can't bring myself to ask a human,

because I fear the answer so much

and hearing what I already know proves

to be unbearable.

I spend hours trying to understand

Robert Fripp's Exposure,

but become ensconced in the primal screaming,

the words hurt

yet the sounds are soothing.

Its difficult to breathe

and even harder to see

yet I continue down the path

passing so many underwear salesmen

on the way,

I think of Underdog

and why he continued under the most

dire of circumstances and with

such little respect and understanding.

Another zap to my brain and I am somewhere

else, swimming with no fear of drowning

but with the utmost respect for all

the sharks and moray eels in the world.

I picture Oskar, playing his drum

and I want one,

I want to drown the outside out

and if the noise gets too much I will

play louder.

Little Oskar knew, he knew how

to stem the blight and control

the voices in his head and soul,

but the drum remained the hero,

not him.

MCC