Not sure if you’ve ever
heard of
Phineas Gage,
but he was a railroad man somewhere
in Vermont
and one day he accidentally blew a
******* iron rod through his
******* think-box and
here’s the kicker:

He
*******
lived.

Now, this big metal cylinder,
on its flight path,
carved a cavern in Gage’s
cerebrum, more specifically
through his frontal lobe
and when the bleeding finally stopped
and they got his left eye all sewn shut
he told the first person he saw,
probably a loved one crowded around his
filthy hospital bed
to kindly
******* and Die.

He got out of that hospital bed,
eventually,
and when he did, he tried his damndest
to go back to work
but he just couldn’t.

What’s more his friends said he just wasn’t
Gage
any more. His personality
had changed.

He didn’t give a **** about
the sunset anymore.
He liked his coffee black and his pancakes
dry.
Which is strange because beforehand
he didn’t drink any coffee
and he didn’t like pancakes much neither.
He also became quite
the drinker,
which is funny considering he hadn’t had
a drop
of alcohol
in his life
before then.

You see I always thought that
personality
was something you couldn’t
touch.
That it was some grand unifying evidence
of the existence of the human
soul.
But here’s Gage,
who just so happens to take
a pole to the dome
and suddenly he’s just
not
Gage.

So maybe it’s true
that we’re all just
machines
and you can pull a man’s
favorite color
or his taste in music
or his eating habits
out of his head
and set them on a sterile tray
right in front of him.

That makes sense.

But everything in me
still wants to
believe.

Up early today.























Got the worm.

The past is an old, bearded man in a tattered coat,
Pulling at my arm with insistence,
Meeting little resistance.
A Fagin, enticing me with Dickensian charm.
I always was a sucker for nostalgia,
Let me live in a fairy tale, or hide myself in history,
Turn me loose in fiction.

The future is a ghost, transparent, beckoning,
All she has to sell is the unknown,
Which I face with reluctance, with some fear.
A new start, yes, but I don't want to finish with my Fagin.
There's comfort in the misery of the known,
The knowing, roots me in securely,
Untethered, I may float from existence,
Both past and present, lost to me as I hang in the balance,
Caught between the years' end and a new beginning,
Static, frozen, fearful, tharn.

This pain is an animal
That I have not tamed.

Its teeth will fall out
And sooner or later
I am bound to feel sorry for it.

I’ve tickled it into his naked back,
When he’s ******* me it spools around my tongue,
I devote myself with every playful smack –
And harder still when certain smacks have stung.

I never thought I’d fall for such a man,
Who smuggles love like drugs inside a coat,
I love loudly just because I can,
The words collect like songbirds in my throat -

Or three boats arranged into a fleet,
To sit behind a hesitating sky,
Sulking with the shyess of retreat,
Billowing with every loaded sigh.