THE LITTLE MICE THAT NIBBLE DEJA-VU
Be careful what you wish for. Or what you prophesy. Maybe that’s all prophecy is, a wish come true.
Love me tender, love me true, sang Elvis, and then he lowered his head into a toilet and puked up a lifetime of bad drugs. Did he see it coming? Did he wish for it?
The things you wish for that you get, that’s deja-vu. Like stepping in front of a speeding truck. First you hear the blast of the air horn, and then you turn startled into the glaring headlights. It flashes through your mind that you’ve always lived within this moment.
***
When I first came to this valley I wrote a prose poem titled “The Little Mice That Nibble” that was in fact a Shard harbinger. The Shards have always been in me,locked down tight for years in a simpleton’s Guantanamo prison. But all the surveillance cameras and torture techniques and the ring of Coast Guard cutters around the island of my heart were not enough to keep the Shards from breaking free. And now here they are in all their glory,rampaging through the internet like Huns.
I pick up speed and digress, right through the flotilla of Coast Guard cutters. To digress is to wiggle free.
Hoist the Jolly Roger! Full steam ahead for the Miami night life!
***
The little mice that nibble. Watch for them. They’ll take you apart over time–a finger here, a toe there. For me it started with an onslaught of childhood diseases. Then years of childhood delirium migraines. Later on my back and eyes went bad. Hernias, blown knees, diminished hearing, and still I kept dancing. And then the aneurysms struck deep, and I turned startled into the onrushing light while angels trumpeted like air horns on an 18-wheeler.
All of it happens gradually except the ending.
