Stay In One Place While Swimming Wildly Poem by Margaret Alice

If the neurons stopped their wild firing so that vision and
consciousness stopped flickering on and off; I might have
been able to see or at least understand; but as it is, my
mind is a flickering bulb on the verge of going out

Emotional experience is gone and as Seth emphasizes
the importance of emotional understanding and I have none;
I should crawl into a hole and stay there until my brain stops
misfiring and I can think an feel again

Such times as these I can feel what it is to lose a sense of
chronology and causality, life becomes one big moment of
now and since everything can’t enter my consciousness
simultaneously, my brain simply starts

Short-circuiting, interrupting the forward motion of time
so that I stay in one place while swimming wildly for shore –
and there’s more – I have NO sense of responsibility, the
nearest I get to that is by trying to hide the fact…