I am the guy who once played the accordion badly at a second rate social event.
Once I stood on my head in the rain. I can’t do this anymore. But I think about it.
I have never really been able to write the full story of my childhood. It was a Jekyll and Hyde affair. I mean you can’t be bullied in school and abused by a drunken mother at home and not prefer being someone else. Mr. Hyde was the inside guy who hated being disabled. He still lurks. Reader’s note: he has bad breath.
To this day I talk to myself. My wife sees me, says, “what are you saying?” I shrug. How can I say? I’m reciting fragments the way some skip pebbles. It might be someone else’s words. Maybe Ezra Pound: “And the days are not full enough/And the nights are not full enough/And life slips by like a field mouse/Not shaking the grass”… Or sometimes it’s just me: “Trace the veins of a barberry leaf, that’s Braille enough…” Talking in sidelong darknesses of broken manners, when the day is insufficient, the minutes not feeding me… Up river go the words, the lonely words. Oh anything will do. Kropotkin I love you. I have excellent hands. How the kings of France loved tennis.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
