Prose or a prose poem, whatever the difference I did not seem the point 
of splitting it into lines just for appearance's sake.

PAIN

Long ago I knew a paralytic woman who slept away most of her days,
face twitching from a seeming secret wiring beneath her skin that was
the visible sign of her rest.  Once I summoned the heart to ask her if
she ever dreamed of being able to walk, and she replied in a voice I
had never heard, "No, I dream I can fly."  She knew we spoke the
halting phrases of a common language, Chagall's visions, not just of
lovers floating over the village (for she could allude to the truth
that we never were nor could be technical lovers), but to the torment
of the Christ-rabbi of my lost faith, his manhood blasphemously and
lovingly swathed in a tallis loincloth, afloat on his Cross over that
same small town.  Troubled, then, the dream of sleep, but hers, mine,
now?

My dream seems more modest and weighted-down by daytime: to be able to
hold a pen and write in one (any, truly) of the high-priced notebooks
I buy compulsively.  But of course my dream is grandiosity itself, it
only begins with coated paper and a fine ink pen that somehow will
magically cure illegibility and my prescription pad scrawl, but,
creeping upward like Socrates' final gift, thaumaturgically removes
the howl and yuck I call Real Life: the hello-for-the-day-by-seven-AM
cramps that begin with fingers and wrist, then spread upward to the
legs, the stomach, back, the spine itself--a prolonged paingasm that
translates the act of mere writing into a global awfulness, walking
and sitting, and makes them an exercise in the unendurable that must
be endured.  I bring the pain to reading, by happenstance, Roth's
"Anatomy Lesson," and am full not with identificatory dismay but with
unconcealed delight, for I am freed for a moment from me into a warm
bath of schadenfreude I have lusted after far too long.

Bion described the black hole of depression, despair, that consumes
its host in a world of physical and spiritual suffering, not in
disregard of its own coming obliteration, but uncaring, sure of its
certain hope of the resurrection and the life, easily leaving a
destroyed cinder on the ground, free to enter through the aether of
universal sickness another unsuspecting being.  You should have known,
the warnings whispered or cried, you simply had to be there, no regard
that it began in your mind or body, no matter "whose fault it was,"
both would marry, serpentanic curl themselves around the monstrous
flailing rod that beats the sufferer not into submission but into
renewed consciousness. The dream of flight, the dream of handwriting,
maybe once attainable, now the remnants of shattered glass on a
laboratory floor.  Breakage.

KTW/11-20-09

-- 
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Kenneth Wolman			    rainermaria.typepad.com

"I agree with the Chekhov character who, when in a crisis, he is
reminded that 'this, too, shall pass,' responds 'Nothing
passes.'"--Philip Roth