Dinnertime with Shrapnel

MRI contrast looks like so many bullets and AA batteries and

It leaves shrapnel in my frontal lobe like

Lobotomy glass, broken ice pick – in through the orbital socket, now.

(Maybe I’d be better off?)

No, not lobotomy glass – menagerie glass,

Dropped at the wrong moment – dropped like a dead limb,

And unwanted climb, unwanted complication.

(Aren’t all complications unwanted?)

I’m learning that consciousness is a privilege.

And I’ve looked at the images myself,

Black and white and ghastly but

As they say,

Unremarkable in nature. The same

Skull black void, in the correct shape (so they tell me) –

With Tim Burton eye sockets, my body is trite as well.

(Or it has been since the early 2000’s.)

Oh yes the knock of my time gaps, and my fraying seams

And the increasingly unsubtle nod of the head like the flicking of a switch

Some distance between reality and

The Mariana Trench.

Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos,

Thrice bitches.

Not a thread of fate pulled on a weaving loom but the spools of my brain,

Exhumed from my skull like

Wet spaghetti.

And I’m afraid, my dear,

There’s not enough to feed the table.