Cauda Equina

 

At the long end of the lumbar line, listen for the wild rumors, whispers

of warnings: collapse is coming. In the beginning, there was violence, too.

Fresh nerve explosions, the beat-to-beat regimented repetition of the

segmentation clock, then each knob, root, and ring stacking one on top

of the other, a bundle of shock absorbers, coiled springs, begets the graceful

 

curves of five sections from cervical top to horse’s tail. Thirty-three prehistoric

bones grow, fuse, take up more and more room in their own small universe.

Years and years later, the rising chatter reveals those same nerves frayed

like fried wires, scorched beyond repair, pressed into less and less space.

Gradual onset gives way to the full pull of gravity. One last sound: the deep

 

groan of devastated molecules, particles -- separating, rearranging -- before

being thrust into this yawning abyss. Down and down and down. Then silence.

Stunted and stilled at the bottom of the world. Above you, the atmosphere thins:

it is hard to believe they expect you to breathe. What else do they want you

to do? Get up; walk it off? Remember walking around. Footsteps upstairs. The feel

 

of feet on the ground. Delicate lungs can regenerate, repair. The liver grows

its own tissue, too. Skin hardens, scars. But the spine – oh, the spine! – does it

dirty. What’s done is done. What’s lost is lost. No one denies the night is long.

That there will be more violence. It is sensible for you to remain inflamed, nauseous,

stunned. Someone needs to tick off time while you wait for those thirty-three

 

bones – calcium hard, collagen spongy – to succumb. Someone needs to bear

witness to the ones that bend, compress, into other dimensions. They used to

call it shellshock when there would be no more messages received, nothing here

or there, no more sensation, but you can still send signals into space, shrug off

form and function. Don’t look down; it is too late for questions.

 

 

 

 

Scare

 

Once, in a twilight sleep so deep it was just shy of a fugue state, I set forth on a fact-finding mission following the curving path of my hijacked

mind. Back on the straight line, still shimmering around the edges, were the occasional sparks

and shocks of distant cramps, phantom pains,

fleeting discomfort, start-and-stop symptoms, but, in time, they – and the remnants of reality – ceased to exist, so in the stark face of grim

discoveries that require grim decisions, I gave into the dark energy in that new realm. There are always thresholds to cross.

 

I want to tell you what I saw there. Show you all the sights there were to behold. As you might imagine, everything requires surgical

extraction. When you are not awake yet awake, they cut out organs, inspect them for margins.

In the soft, glowing light of this

particular purgatory, your body parts are up for examination.

 

Smallish feet smoothly separated – somehow—from their long-ago child legs, once burned,

then bloodless, dry, without juice or mucus

or oils and stripped down to gray-brown bones were on display. A pair of previously ashy, dirty lungs busily repairing themselves in real time

before the damage couldn’t be undone. Everything on a tight schedule. Spines twisting -- some with potential trouble—in primordial bodies,

bobbing in great glass tanks: which one, which one, would I choose? A rough patch of rigid removed skin once biopsied within an inch

of itself – dug so deep, stretched so tight – that only flimsy wrinkled tissue remained. Thousands and thousands of abandoned, neglected eggs,

jellied and slick, swimming in their own wet universe, popping with possibility one at a time, then dying all at once on the vine. Thickened

veins stood out against the tangible parts of the pulsing organ in question. The distance, the space – negative but tactile – between what I didn’t

know and what I would soon learn. Once, before this, I bit a finger on my essential left hand – hard to the bone but did not lop it off—

and for the first time understood the power of the body in parts, the bite force of a mammal’s mouth, the want, the fear, the intent of hunger.

 

It will eat you alive.

 

I can’t promise they won’t feed whatever is left, the scraps, piecemeal, from your physical form, --still bloody, still beating -- to the local

wildlife, animals living on the edge of existence. It’s okay. We all need to be fed. What is left except to have bits and pieces removed,

and wonder what to do with the leftovers. Wander in the dark long enough, dream when you

are not supposed to dream, and you

might find yourself compelled to take that desperate drag of pure oxygen, prep for colorless camouflage, slip into an exoskeleton,

just in case there are sudden shudders, whispers, calling you back, as they called me, and

for once, I thought, I listened.

 

Maybe I never left. All memory is temporary, so how did they put me back together? How we acknowledge what can happen, the precariousness

of how we slip out and slip in. How to accept the violent injury of realizing that one chapter

has ended, and another will soon begin.