BRAIN GESTAPO MOUNTING STAIRS

BRAIN GESTAPO MOUNTING STAIRS

The cells are dying left and right,
Even as I sit to type, they vanish in thin air.
Never to return to me,
The brain Gestapo mounting stairs.

The secondary symptoms,
Pain that shoots up and down the back,
The dyskinesias from the meds,
They throw the DBS off track.

This disease evil as Hitler,
How fitting that it struck him down,
In the prime of his misspent life,
With his mistress Eva Braun.

The cells are dying in my brain,
A tortured unrelenting rain,
A private concentration camp,
Where movement slows and muscles cramp.

And each day drawing closer, like a river to the sea,
Each day heralds helplessness and immobility.
And when I smile it’s behind a mask that few can even see,
I am not a navel gazer or a sucker for self pity.

But I live with a monster invading my body,
Washing up like a tsunami on my brain’s helpless shore.
Nothing to do but pop the pills like candy,
And writhe like Chubby Checker, a strange version of the twist,
The doctors tell me less is more, and I struggle to make sense of this.

I am, alas, a lucky man, my wits still with me twelve years in,
And there are folks far worse than me who have stood where I now stand,
This barren space, this desolate place, these grains of shifting sand.
This disease is like some society lady, noisily putting on airs,
Back to the days of the thought police, the brain Gestapo mounting stairs.

A mother ship with no place to land, but someplace hard when I fall.
Less and less a presence in the affairs of my world.
My universe the size of these ceilings and walls
Meanwhile my right side is stymied and paralyzed,
My left it is not far behind,
I’d like to rent a space machine,
And mosey back in time.

Back when I moved more freely and knew what I know now,
The movement I once took for granted could rise again and bow.
But all I can do is wait by the gate for the rest of the brain to disintegrate,
And cherish the good days as they sneak up unawares,
Like the evil Hitler in his prime,
His brain Gestapo mounting stairs.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED