Cellular Variants

 

Oh, was it last year I became an immigrant,

that I had immigrated, and the world

became darker, everything more distant?

My wife said, “Are you there?”

She thought I had some kind of dementia,

like Alzheimer’s, as though

my brain cells had been rolled like a pair of dice.

All of them. Jumbled. As if they had been dumped

into a paper bag, and someone shook.

 

When I think about it I start to itch,

and I have to scratch.

I can feel the cells sliding, colliding, bumping,

one over the other, changing places. Occasionally

new cells come down from where they were in storage,

but are all too soon caught up in this degenerative process.

 

Sometimes it is like, all over again, I am in a kind

of classroom, and they are trying to teach me.

The teachers shrug their shoulders: realizations

of the impossible. Without their noticing

I had moved from one seat to another.

Although the seats are all the same, all are uncomfortable,

The perspective, though, is different.

It was like I was observing it all

from another part of the universe, like the cells

had now settled down. Actually

they are making believe they are functioning.

 

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