Twilight Cleans You Out

May 2011

A friend, after looking at some notes for an essay I decided I could not write, suggested I turn them into a poem. An interesting exercise in transmutation. The notes were written on a night in the hospital after surgery. It was perhaps the only night I was alone and I had plenty of time to ponder where I had been and where I seemed to be headed. The push and pull of the poem “form” altered — or forced me to alter — the sense of the notes, and certainly the sense of the essay I felt I could not write from those notes. I’m not sure it is a poem though I am sure I am not a poet.

Twilight cleans you out.

I am simplified,

The apparent complexity of the world reduced.

Consciousness expands,

Freedom.

But it slips away,

And the old facility returns.

First forced to abdicate,

Then forced to lift the burden once again.

Sleepless,

My body torn and mutilated,

I mourn the loss of clarity more.