i spy with my little eye something but barely

I Spy With My Little Eye Something But Barely

8/ 4/ 14

Today . . . MRI, labs, doctor . . . as scheduled. The plan . . . chemo no more, Avastin three more, back to 4 mg of steroid up from 2mg, some new arrangement of MRIs, labs, and doctor visits.  And then back to Great Monitoring Project in which I am perennially engaged ; although I’d prefer an engagement with a great monitor lizard. Poisonous-ness moot.

8/ 5/ 14

For the first time ever, as I always do, it seemed I did my research online, this time on the déjà vu phenomenon -- a phenomenon I am familiar with, these days, or at least was cognizant of in days gone by.

As I suspected, there is a link between Google and the answers I sought; more to the purpose, a link between brain diseases and déjà vu.

I’ve been walking under clouds of diaphanous recall -- vast clouds -- not the sort of cloud one walks under and catches a drizzle-drop on the ear --vast clouds -- the sort of cloud that burgeons, darkens, threatens but never culminates in storm. Déjà vu clouds. Recall with no purpose, recall with no end.

Lately, I’ve been walking through not just under these clouds -- diaphanous clouds, a sight barely seen, sheer yet clearly bulging with ado about the surreal. My disease walks me under and through these accumulations of faux import at every fifth or sixth turn, it seemed. Fascinating, no doubt, but for my part, give me Edna waking or scootching tiles any day. Hallucinations are bogus . . . illusory images born of suggestions from the real world -- creepy but actual. That is to say, when hallucinating, I am actually seeing what I’m seeing, out joint with my personal understanding of dynamics, sure, but not out-of-bounds in terms of possibility, or even what I take to be rational.

I know about movement and I recognize it when I see it . . .  in hummingbirds, in Janjiis. I know about cause and effect . . . in theory, in practice. I know about perception . . . its reliance on synapses, its relation to pre- existing cognitive footholds.

However, I am infinitely  nonplussed by déjà vu. Is it a realm with amorphous borders that one walks into  benightedly like into an child's very recent divestment of pee in the shallow end at the Y?

Is it a time?  A multidimensional, non-delineated, omni-absence situated neverywhere? If so . . . will it consume me, can I escape it's event horizon? To shake it off will I need a DeLorean? A musty wardrobe?

Could it be I took left when I should have taken a right?

A right into family in front of the TV watching, as ever, brand new houses being rejuvenated or laughing at last night's Letterman on the DVR.  A left into family in front of the TV, as forever and forevermore, watching Leno (it can't be) and laughing (nope no way, not on my watch!); a right to arrive at a corridor
of glass conjoining the parking deck and the clinic proper.

A left, to arrive at a corridor's glass, my corridor, my glass and its view of my town and its populace hastening to a dream I had just now about smudged handprints, about cars and what all they're missing down there, and the warmth in diagonal sun-rays.  That one ray I'm always drawn to, drawn into just now, only to emerge mid-turn, at a corridor (mine or that dude's in the wheelchair shimmying towards the sun, watching the town as one might a cloud he expects to dissipate anytime now or then . . . whichever when turns him (us?) loose.

Nope, you can keep the voodoo confabulations; I’ll take my too-tall man and periphery faeries.

After the great seizure event of 2012, I needed to have physical therapy to learn how to walk again which included balance exercises one of which involved standing upright on a ball  with a rubber ring around it for my feet.  Once situated and balanced, my therapist would lightly prod my back and shoulders to test my stability -- she called these prods “perturbations” and I instantly fell in love with the term as it related my improvement, and eventually I fell in love with the notion -- remembrance as a function of re-learning, or memory as a light-speed portal to the past or even, speculatively speaking, to the future or an unmoving now. The stuff of déjà vu and old pictures.


Perturbations in Photograph

I am the ghost of the child who is

In sepia tones unwrapping gifts
Beside his young-again mother

Tiny against the Alamo
Blue-striped socks hiked knee-high

The trailing of the two climbers
Halfway up the blazing white hill

In tuxedo tails bearing a ring
Bashful beside the flower girl

Horrified in the batter’s box
Jealous of Danny’s base-on-balls

A friend among celebrant friends
On some auspicious day or other

Hunched-over the gray cul-de-sac
Astride a gravelly football

The monkey topsy-turvy
Deep in the lead-based jungle-gym

I am the man of the ghost who was
The specter of double exposure

Angel in vigil for bone-dust dogs.