without fear

Greg Correll

W R I T E R

Greg Correll

Location: New Paltz, New York, US
Birthday: September 21

Title: Founder, Chief of Deselopy (small packages); Editor (doesthismakesense.com)
Company: small packages, inc.

Bio: I write.

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JUNE 24, 2012 1:08AM

Rate: 19 Flag

Azilect and her agonist kin

make in me minor miracles, of a sort.

The tremor and confusion abate, but there's more.

I freak out, I want you to know, as usual. But it's better.

A pure panic and a psychedelic dread throbs in my cortex,

it always has, but now...?

Now it's a cold steel band in my chest, that fades.

Not the runaway burn, felt in all my mortal fiber, like before.

Like for most of my life, before the Parkinson's med Azilect.

Now the red remains within,

but the red glints blue,

then small, steady white.

This is new. The scrip alters me,

gives me a ten percent shift, away from lost,

then takes me over to live-with-it, finds me a chair.

I am not transformed or redeemed.

But a lovely little sense of dispassion displaces

my usual fallen-on-glass feeling.

More a momentary twinge of drama,

less an hour-long cringe-o-rama.

Without FEAR, and with the same old fear,

—except it lost its sharp stick.

If I invest myself in this drug

I get collusion, not collision,

with my trap-door-drop anxiety.

A little like how your best friend

from when you were eleven, magically

hovers again, to tease and distract you:

"Look out, look at this one, his claws!

A blue crawdad!"

And in the wave in front of your nose,

you face the fear, and laugh.

Dangers and thrills, fingers and claws,

but safe. Like safe used to be, long ago,

before JFK got his brains all over Dealey Plaza.

The revived acuity in me, the damped-down zig-zag dance of limbs,

are worth all titration blues, and the old-guy regime,

even the nasty side effects of the last drug,

the vomiting and passing out, too; getting here was worth it.

But I also get this scary, beautiful perspective.

Because it shrinks the loathing, and leaves behind

an intact, understandable, transient fear. Manageable.

It is useful. And necessary. It improves me.

A profound change.

Even so...

Am I still me, on these drugs?

Do I still have writerly edge and verve?

my flammable vocabulary?

my perfervid heart-song prose?

my knack for raw and acute reveals?

my observational skill?

Will I still be able to articulate

the lost, elusive sensations of life

give voice to the oddly familiar (but never expressed),

the flamboyant, beautiful qualities of my human-ness?

my Greg-ness?

and will I do it with alacrity?

These are brain drugs, so they alter me.

The pills reclaim for me my ability, yes,

jet me up with alert energy, yes,

give me a more ordinary demeanor,

quakeless, o yes.

But will it grind off my burr'd prominences,

sand off my sharpest points?

Until I am normalized,

shaped, finished, lacquered and stowed away?

Unable to find my familiar inner stain,

I will scrub at it for you anyway, from memory, constant reader,

but does it make of me a nostalgic putterer?

The question of medicated identity is a question for our age.

It demands of us careful thought.

But it is my brain, my self,

what deserves a poetic response.

So with my regular breath:

A sonnet for my dosed and dilute Self, this is.

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Comments

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"getting here was worth it."

sounds like you're doing better! Glad to read it. It was worth it!

Kathryn O'Hehir

June 24, 2012 01:14 AM

Nothing diluted here friend, nor closed.

Still all sharp edges, and shattered and shattering glass.

And distance can be a good thing (looking at Venus through a telescope for instance, much better than close up and personal with her toxic vapors ;).

Rated for peculiar clarity.

Seer

June 24, 2012 01:22 AM

I want to say yes, yes you are still you, at least on these pages what I read I see you clearly...

Lunchlady 2

June 24, 2012 01:30 AM

I'm happy you're feeling better. Is that you while on the meds? If you were drunk on your ass, is that you? Is that you on a brain chemistry-altering drug? If I were on a drug that would tear down the many mental walls I've built, would I still be me? I don't know.

Stim

June 24, 2012 02:53 AM

this is good news!

and this: "Unable to find my familiar inner stain,
I will scrub it for you anyway, from memory"

is brilliant.

lorianne

June 24, 2012 03:44 AM

"...a blue crawdad..." How that image captured me.

Linda Treiber

June 24, 2012 04:08 AM

oh yes!!! i am so glad to read this! you sure aint dulled yet!

and the medicated self, is it the self - a question i pondered for oh, 20 years before i decided to find out for myself. for me, i was me, except better.

greg, i am so glad you found something that is helping. sending you the biggest hug, and my day might just be made.

thank you.

daisyjane

June 24, 2012 06:34 AM

Since I've seen you, Greg, I am bore "bound" to the chair, but, yes, the getting here was/is worth it.

r.

Jonathan Wolfman

June 24, 2012 06:58 AM

"more", of course

Jonathan Wolfman

June 24, 2012 06:58 AM

Beautifully wrought, Greg.

Thinking about you. Going to a fundraiser this morning for Rock Steady Boxing (http://www.rocksteadyboxing.org/): a fantastic program in Indianapolis for people with Parkinson's.

Ken Honeywell

June 24, 2012 07:33 AM

" Like safe used to be, long ago ...."
Like safe ... used ... to be ...

anna1liese

June 24, 2012 07:52 AM

"Manageable" seems to be the key here. The pome reveals a mind and sensibility as strong and sharp and provocative and sublime and enraging as ever, to me. Raw-nerved pre-Azilect artists did terrible things to themselves and their loved ones trying to move along the leering abyss, knowing damned well it was inches away - a fraction of an inch away - yet self-medicating and self-deluding to keep from allowing the leer to seduce. The leer is always there and mere knowledge of it can shrivel all but the strongest hearts. Seems to me your heart is strong enuf, Greg, and your mind sharp as ever - maybe sharper with the challenge of this new vista to explore and capture. Manageable fear might well be Big Pharma's plea for love. This pome sure as hell is a gift, to you and us.

Chicken Mãâàn

June 24, 2012 08:41 AM

There is another one, a Spira Mirabilis, at work in me, right now, and it is: all of you. "I get all I need, after writing like this, just from the writing of it" -- is my stiff-upper'd pretense, mostly true. But really really, what I also hope for is this: that my friends who Know will read and comment.

Who know poetry, language, the clarifying power of a phrase, the elevation, if not grace, that comes from lifting the veil on human truths, and say what can only live in crafted, pourforth lines.

And who know me, know my history, know this material from their own reality and family and inner compass. My friends here who have Parkinsons, or cancer, or MS, or strain and struggle of any un-kind.

And who forgive me my un-constant and cruddy record for responding and commenting, for the last 6 months. And still you arrive. Even a dozen of these might as well be eighty EP'd doo-dahs, when you heart me this way, with particulars and attentive kindness. I heart you all.

Greg Correll

June 24, 2012 08:56 AM

You were definitely still you in this piece.

This resonated because my mom had Parkinsons and I also went through a lot of these same feelings 20 years ago when I had to decide whether to put my six year old daughter on Ritalin. Would I be changing her life? Taking away her joie de vivre? Altering the balance that was her? Changing what she could see? Or feel? Ultimately, we tried the drug and she thrived--still her.

jlsathre

June 24, 2012 09:43 AM

I love this. We're all flesh vials of bio-chemistry, all seeking articulated selves in numbing circumstance. Will you lose yourself, your Greg-ness? You are large, you contain multitudes.

consonantsandvowels

June 24, 2012 11:40 AM

Greg this drug is working on Parkinson's not on YOU. I have dystonia but I never heard of this med. Well, one illness at a time over here but your voice is essential as ever.The medication leaves you freer not altered, yes? R

wendyo

June 24, 2012 08:40 PM

and what a poetic response.

maria heng

June 24, 2012 10:27 PM

OMg Greg....I am here just to give you a good honest smile..

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