Why?  (A Prose Poem)



Why do I feel this way, about the scintillate sparks before my eyes, the miasma of fuzz that addles my brain?  I need no drugs, no alcohol, nothing to dull or expand my senses.  My mind quickens and slows and still I am suspended in a warm bath of love of family and friends.   I am lucky.  I have the luck of the Irish, so that I can always count on it when dispirited.  But today my spirit is fine, I love myself, but in a detached Buddha like way, and I have at this moment the all-consuming brotherly love for all humans, Jesus-like.   I wish for fried fish on Fridays, but I have left off the Catholic ways, choosing instead a path that speaks more truly to me.  I cast my lot with the Saints in the mountains of Utah.

I went off to the Air Force Base in the summer during college, for officer training.  My flight leader was Golden.  Lieutenant Golden.  I started having problems sleeping.  It got worse and worse.  Why couldn’t I sleep?  Why the racing thoughts?  It’s been a long journey since that time, and I would hear the thop of the helicopter rotors as the aircraft flew me away from Eglin and over the swamps of Florida.  What was wrong with me?  I slept nearly the whole month of August, 1985.  A coma, the doctors called it.  I saw Jesus in a desert in the depths of dreamland.  Was it really Jesus?  He looked like a younger version of my dad.  He told me it was not time to cross the stream yet.

I would pass out studying in the “stacks” of the UF library, wake up to the helicopter rotors and the soundtrack of The Wall.  And amazingly, I kept coming back, trying to finish school, again and again.  And I did finish school.  Eventually.  Then, a graduate degree.  What drove me?  It seemed story was the only thing that still made sense to me.  Making order from chaos.

Many times over the years I went over the brink into that profound abyss.  That abyss, the hospitals, wards filled with madness, gibbering insanity and still just to function during the passes from the mental ward back to my old world.  Please, dear editor, take this prose poetry and make sense of suffering.  Make my pain into meaning.  Help me to create the story that will complete the puzzle.

More than this.  There is nothing, more than this.  Just a healing balm and a meditative silence as the keys clack on the computer.   Will any of these convoluted contortions of conscience, these hours on the flight simulator, ever bring back that ever-elusive dream of 1985?

















Dementia



Phone call from Dad, twilight, Provo Municipal Airport:

Allegiant Airliners taxiing, big and lumbering,

Bumble on the tarmac, aimless jumbos.

We talk words that will dissolve in your mind

In a moment, like Alka-Seltzer,

Plop, plop, fizz, fizz!

never to be recalled.

This conversation, like thousands of other heart-crushing ones,

Over the decades, the unfulfilled promises, the yearning,

The years in pains-taking therapy re-constructing our diminished family of two, recalled

In flashes now, like semaphore, over the distance of thousands of miles,

The frost-covered mountains of healing between.

All this is freighted in small snippets of thought.

What was that?  Maybe?  You say, perhaps you’ll fly me to Florida.

You say, if they give you money from the Camp LeJuene case.

This dialogue breaks up like so many,

Hid ephemeral oath misting away

Like an eternally forgotten memory.

Dad, I hear your voice so often these days, real and echoed in sleep,

But I fear I will never lay eyes on you again

Until Heaven’s Celestial Kingdom.













Dr. Fukuda Calls from the VA Every Pearl Harbor Day



“I should heed my doctor’s warnings,

She does the best with me she can.

She claims I suffer from delusions,

Yet I’m so confident I am sane,

It can be no optical illusion,

Then how can you explain

The Shadows in the Rain…”

--Sting, “Shadows in the Rain”



Dr. Fukuda calls me every Pearl Harbor Day and every Memorial Day.

I’m not sure why, and I don’t know if her VA bosses know either,

Or if it is just her way of saying history holds no hard feelings

For us 21st Century fellow Americans.  She seems without a shade of guile

Or mischief.   I do know her wide smile always greets me with a warm beam

Of concern and genuine healing intent with each Facetime session.

Her meds and monotone keep my compass fixed

On the True North of good health,

And it’s steady as she goes, good doctor.