Not Quite Right

For Illustration Friday's Voices on 12-19-08

They all know
Everybody knows
That I'm not quite right
Their timid small talk dissipates
As I stare right through them
With empty eyes
I subvert their ease

Can't let them see
There's no control
Else I'll succumb to the madness
Concentrate my focus
Past their whispers
The worms
And the shadows

Determined to gaze long enough
For reality to be revealed
They don't realize that I understand
Perceive their discomfort
My concern with them is fleeting

Ignore the Whispers
The Worms
And the Shadows
Destroy the imagined
Before escaping past my lips
Fixate on the tangible
The alternative is a nightmare

Two months of fading
Through a disjointed world
Secrets leak without comprehension
Intellect is annulled
Desperate to fill the empty crevices
The spirit randomly dumps images
Else bereft of memory
I would perish

They all know
Everybody knows
My mother repeats the words
I once said
My memories crash in
On the crest of a wave
While hers are sucked out
In the undertow of Dementia

I watch her private fantasies
Tumble out before me
Like a play
Whose script was shuffled in the wind
Now the pages have all blown away
Nothing left to fill the empty spaces
I don't want to watch anymore

They all know
Everybody knows
My brother's uttered these words, too
"I've got brain damage", he jokes
Hoping to excuse his behavior
The voices tell him
He must lead with the right foot
The therapist stretches his mind
Twenty years of trying to see
That he needs to look away

I remember racing down back roads
He doesn't
I have to pretend it's normal
Afraid of the Whispers
The Worms
And the Shadows


Mary sent me a poem I really love called Edge Of Glass, about her mother's dementia. Check it out. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom to see the English version.