CONTUSION

For my mother...with deepest compassion

"I know dementia," she says. "It is all I know.
It is your worst nightmare.
But I do not fear it. I live there.

Is it my instability that frightens you -
my unpredictability?
Or fear of contamination, that my condition is contagious?

Love is an illusion,
how it runs from the hard times!
See how it disappears like a puff of smoke

just when you need it most? Loneliness
is turning me to stone. I lash out in frustration.
I'm hurting. I want you to know how it feels.

They're slowly poisoning me, you know -
these demons who visit me.
See this pale, gaunt face in the mirror?

I have suffered the atrocities of alien abduction:
have been probed and experimented upon
by beings with huge eyes and needles for fingers.

Now I am disintegrating into odd-shaped pieces
that will never fit together again.
I am losing myself. I can't stop screaming.

The sky is darkening: it is coming for me,
the darkness. It will drag me off
to God knows where. But I will not go!

It's not real. It's not real.
It's all in my head - that's what they're saying,
these strangers in white coats who accost and hold me down.

I am deafened by shrieks.
Nightly they pierce my eardrums:
has the Banshee finally come to claim me?

I am terrified of this dark red thing
that lives inside me, just awaiting the right moment
to close down my brain. And what may come after.

Birds fly across the sky.
Are these the bearers of Souls to the next World?
Is it for their deliverance that my arms rise skyward?

Sudden sword-thrust through my head.
What is this blurring of senses, this petrifying
of body and will - some horrifying contusion?

The red thing is devouring me.
A sea of faces, weeping.
The final separation.
A clinical voice saying  Apoplexy."

Oblivion.


Now we, the living, are left
with our legacies of guilt...