The Line Between Luck and Faith

30 April 2k9

Posted here with love and thanks for another patient, who likes this poem. Someone beset on on all sides by pain and challenges, yet rises to face life every day.

You are a mentor, an inspiration, and above all a true friend.

~*~

Differentia

Waiting for a brain MRI is a little like waiting for a subway train,
things will be different afterwards, but one can’t really be sure how.

Despite what the people who work here may believe,
waiting rooms are really for deciding if we want to do this, or not.

What does one wear to have a brain MRI? The Polynesian block-print
Nancy gave me last year perhaps; it is beautiful, and what’s more

Nancy survived a brain tumor. She has walked the line between
luck and faith. How would the world change if we all had to do that?

No, the black cat shirt is best after all; it suits my sense of the sardonic.
Besides, its hissing, arched body and beady little eyes make me smile.

Excuse me, I’m here to have my head examined—
Usually, I don’t have a good reason for stopping the protons in my brain.

I allow my atoms their autonomy, knowing as I do how hard they work.
Yet the smooth flux of their particle dance has grown a bit erratic of late.

Wedged inside the GE machine now; while, bound like demons, huge purring magnets
are waiting for Adrian the Atom Wrangler to blow her whistle: Simon says, STOP!

Inside the machine:
WEEEWAH! WEEEWAH!  CHUNK! CHUNK! CHUNK!

Earplugs reduce Cacophony to a dim Titan. There is the feeling of barely restrained
dissonant fury whirling around me as I lay transfixed within a magnetic maelstrom.

Inside the brain:
Frank was right, ‘Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death.’

I must face Fear or it will climb my back. I am not afraid of the machine.
I am afraid of what it will find.

Adrian listens to the radio frequency of me, astronomers listen to decaying stars.
I suspect they sound the same. You are tuned to WDON. EFFF EMMM! No static at all…

What flavor would the Grim Reaper’s popsickle be?
We learn to live under a vast weight of many small things gathered.

~DC McKenzie

—end transmission—