Poem for Day 8 of National Poetry Month

A bit dense and disturbing, but I'm still recovering from the dream poem, #7, already posted:


Remedies for Diffusion

I

When my mind is splintering
I need not to be alone.

Identity's fractionation:
Who will squeeze my arm?

Funhouse mirror, receding view.
Aren't they all thinking of me?

This sickness is unto death,
this sensation of me in distant pieces offered,
when my body hair wakes with air
and I lift toward heaven,
how any part may or may not
cohere, as likely to spin out as orbit in.

II

Is it presumptuous to assume unity from personality,
say from a gladhanding televangelist hawking soap
who feels good about himself with no disunity
between motive and action, money and gospel,
who feels himself one self and not an act
unless it be an act his real self endorses?

Compare this with the redwood shattered
into a million matchsticks, the lost parasols
of a dandelion's head.

Perhaps the primary difference between him and me
is that I can be diffused into a hundred-piece symphony
and he is like a saxophone playing one note at a time,
whole and wholly sequential.

But how does he learn to take for granted
the unity so necessary for every function?
A unity as a mental patient I am forced to fuss about?


III

I digress. What helps? Concentrating
on my typing in the moment of composition,
I attain the identity of an archer fish
shooting a mosquito down by parallax
or the sunyata of the tarantula hawk's orange wings
flapping above its body bent in stinging--
these images concentrate quite wonderfully,
though this comment, “wonderfully,”
again divides me from my self, being an admission
that normally I am not concentrated--
but it's hard to hang on to this, surely
there is also a time for being dispersed
like pollen in a meadow without thought.


I had some mixed medical news as well, which left me feeling particularly mortal. And so it goes.


1 Kilorat,

CE