Strange Things Are Going On

Strange Things Are Going On.

What drives a man to write, rewrite, and write again,
what wakes him in the middle of the night
and goads him on beyond a point
where what he writes makes any sense,
filling up a lake of paper,
until it's spilling off his desk?

Is this healthy? Is this wise?
Shouldn't he get out more?
Take more exercise?

I cannot tell you why I do the things I do,
but only what goes on inside my head.

I lead a modest if eccentric life,
propelled by untold quantities of pills.
I'd like to say in my defence
that my disease is teaching me to write.
Unhappily the cost is high.
My ordinary life has disappeared
and with it vanished my career.

While I was being diagnosed
I crossed the bridge into the Great Unknown.
all scattered were my future plans.
I was a stranger in a stranger land,
where you adapt or don't survive for long.
Incurable disease does sort the sheep out from the lambs.

We all have our own normality, and this is mine.

My internal clock strikes three,
and the benefit of my drugs gives way
as uninvited side effects present
their Devious Chemical Cabaret;
It's always the same characters on stage.

Here come my shaking limbs and twisting fingers,
while my head starts rocking to a choppy rhythm.
Now my eyes water and begin to flicker,
and my nose begins to drizzle,
while inside my skull the strings and levers
pull my face into a rubber grimace.

Welcome to the show.
We don't get many tourists here.

Although I have the starring role,
I would prefer a shorter run.
Despite the many empty seats
the show is booked for years to come.

I wish that I could shrink you small enough
so you could climb inside my head
and feel confusion brewing up inside my brain,
while neurons, that control my movements,
continue firing blindly into space.

Nothing functions exactly as the makers expected;
instructions were printed with sections defective.

One minute I'm speaking clearly
and the next my speech is breaking up
and words are turning into mumbles.

I'm sure I gave the right commands,
but the puzzled look upon your face
tells me the message isn't getting through.
I stand here in a fog and can't explain the gulf
between the struggle going on within my mind
and what you see the other side of my blue eyes.

Perhaps if I were a black and white TV,
back in dear old nineteen-fifty-two,
you could bang on my veneer
and I could flash a notice on my screen:

"Please don't molest your TV set.
Hitting it will not correct the faulty signals in my head.
Just be patient. Trained engineers are coming soon,
so in the meantime here is soothing music with pictures
of a spinning potter's wheel."

Come into my private picture show;
I see myself at nine or ten
staring at the potter's wheel.
My mother stumps off to her kitchen.
The cat trots along behind her,
more in hope than expectation.
My father grumbles from the safety of his armchair,
he hasn't paid good money for a television
just to glare at some revolving pudding basin..

Time passes and the scenery is changed.
Some fifty years have come and gone,
and my poor father is long dead.
The cat's no longer in her basket,
and I am now a good deal older,
but no-one's come to fix my head.

Perhaps the engineer will call tomorrow;
nothing here is ever certain.
Perhaps when I pick up the morning post,
I'll look up and see him, half my age,
standing in his Nike trainers, smiling,
waiting patiently upon the step.

Of course, I know it isn't going to happen,
and that any young man on the step
has only called to read the meter.

But in that other world where only I can go,
it could quite easily be so.

Strange things are going on inside my head,
I wonder at and do not always comprehend,
but driven by disease that will not give me sleep or peace,
I try to give them voice and sometimes, if I'm lucky, wings.