Heavenly Bodies

Meds

10 Meds By the rivers of Babylon . . . Psalm 137 1. Living from pill to pill, from bed to couch, what doesn’t kill me only makes me dizzy. Pain dissolves like chalk in water, grit on the bottom of the glass. Waiting takes forever, throbs to the soles of my feet, Bella noche . . . Hives as large as mice hump up under my skin (“no more barbiturates for you, Cynthia!”) —itch, stretch, I don’t fit my flesh— sting, tingle, prick, the sorcerer’s threat. There’s a knife stabbed through my left eye. My right foot is made of elephant hide and weighs in at roughly one cartload of potatoes. Oxygen twenty-four hours; I’m swelled with steroids, prednisone buzz in the brain: a motel room with sixteen foreign workers sleeping in shifts, playing reggae at three a.m. 2. Oh I love my white pill that makes the black fist of pain unclench, unspasming the nerves. I float, released to darkness visible, worlds dissolving. 11 And the yellow pill, bitter on my tongue, that wakes me at 2 a.m. writing out plans in Arabic to organize an expedition to the Pole. Drug of hubris searing my eyes, my scrawl unreadable in daylight: foil my enemies. Bitter taste of fugue, my hand shakes: some foreign being in my brain giving orders. You must You must You will. Later, the pungent brown liquor shoots the dark with threads of gold behind my eyes. One flash as the mind goes out. 3. I must elude pain float past clarity pain in the brain slammed down like a housefly. It’s a big dodge. Fly on a stovetop sizzle and ash pop. This is illusion, mental confusion born in the synapse. What can be undone down to the last gasp. It’s a hodgepodge. 12 If you kill pain you will become pain; pain does not feel pain, no nerves in the brain. It’s a mind-fuck. It’s just your bad luck. A torpor sealed my brain I felt no humans near it seemed to me I could not feel or touch or see or hear. I don’t know who I am without my medicine. My skin will crawl with bugs if I don’t get my drugs. My brain’s a maelstrom, singing a sad song. Reality is so cruel. Prednisone oh prednisone so fast my mind racing, never tasting rest. Razzle-dazzle razz Fist bitch piss stitch witch . . . (only wait, the fit will pass.) fast, gash, lash, splash—QUIT! (I saw a werewolf in a white suit, walking past the tables at the Full Moon Café. Floppy bow tie, big furry hands.) 13 Percodan, Percocet, let you go, let you rest. When the grip lets you go and you float like a note on the flow, there’s your life, there’s no worry— (yeah, it’s funky how the night moves.) Barbiturate babykins, narcotic slut, black oil of opiate. Chatty Cathy, dirty brat, bed-wetter, nasty pants. Painkiller, painkiller, I have a new friend, better than my old friend, plugging holes in the brain: Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Cocaine! I want a soft landing; let me float. Once the seizure lifted me and threw me down. I did not like it. I did not like lying there on the floor looking up through air like green water. 4. And there is one so dark, a ghost, it passes through the mesh of thought without tearing a strand, whispering destinies perceived true, pronouncing sentences of death. 5. A cloud, the absence of a noun, no name, roaring far away in the summer 14 dark like a train, or a giant fan, or a highway that never stops. The mind explodes in the dark of space, unnursed by atmospheres, as air raid sirens scream for blood and I am only nerves, strung on constellations, meridians and vectors quivering. A red and yellow capsule invades the chemistry of thought; cathode rays blast from the television screen and signals pass deep into space until the stars are singing “Rosalita.” You will not remember this night. ...