Sean MahoneyCONDITIONSForgive me. I talked and talked – discursive from Point D to little brain to the Magic Kingdom to the techno tube. I took that what given me. Take this body: what I knew as normal is instead now diagnosed and unfamiliar, foreign even and of a shifting manner I cannot wrap my fingers around, cannot fathom, for my ability to reason is based on slow rain I can smell and the sight of blood loosed by thorns. I will greet my resident native on anything but its own terms: spear-wound, penis-vulva, pen-inkwell. Cave art. Itch. Word after word. I am not wholly autoimmune. I am sick and sufferable by prescribed quantifiers as I slide and grasp while I can still hold on tightly with whatever all I've got is. And this is just the beginning. How much of me, functioning me, will be left in a decade? Dramatic? Yes perhaps. But the truth is, bit by bit, hardly perceptible essences have already been issued papers, been shuttered without so much as a blanket or customary dance. There are so many moments – measurable pyramidal tracts of an event - I will carry with me into what may be my star turn astride the steed set against the fading glow of the horizon. Which, as self-iconic irony, creates nothing but questions about why I am riding into balls of light anyway when I should be working more with resistance. I will not decide for myself if my needs are stridently conditional and just, or just forced unconditionally upon the widening array of concentric circles I am bound to. With. Reckless. Glee. And confusion: at varying points I am bound to bed; bound by duty to those I work with or for; bound to my neurologist who would like nothing more than to throw modifying agents at me; bound to my mother who worries that I may go before her. Bound to this place I rest my head in my arms wondering why couldn't I have just won a piņata instead? Am I bound too to the disability movement of which I feel fringe inclusion…like I've been told it will be x amount of minutes before my table is prepped and ready? Is it just me? Again? With my awkward approach in how I now relate to worn fabrics and lost dialogue with the multiplying dead? Yep. People with MS relative to total global population: .0345%. My hijacked auto-functions are not concentrating themselves as circled wagons – no, far from it: the orgy ensuing a visual tremor when magnetically resonated; skull-fuckery so base as to be comically sadistic compared with milk and kindness. Yes – my community of tissue is being systematically divided and while there is far too much infrastructure for complete shutdown the targeted disruption is proving quite a viable strategy. My community becoming communities; lapsing but mobile. So oddly fitting of this body chugging along like millions of others while my cloaked flaws propagate in a snide manner of erasure (my will to hold you compassionately shifts circle to circle, table to step to step to bed, to horseback against the wasteland of selected memory). These saltatory conductions I internally emit - next to invisible and near what would be considered self-promotional sadness in more than 99% of the world – often lose their way when radiated as it takes each nerve transmission (insert unusually large-for-this-slice-of-hyperbole number here) attempts to make the jump axon to axon multiplied by (pick any inordinately big prime number) before my hand is extended to grasp yours any and all of you– to keep from falling over as my foot has yet attain the rest of this scalable body: disabled, documented, and always for the taking. A gift in perpetuity. Yes, that signal, that electrical itch loitering somewhere in Escher's pen, rose well, set forth, and could not be re-received today. Tomorrow on another floor? Yes – the art(s) of possibility: deconstruct, abuse, partially rebuild. Repeat. Pass on. There will come a time, a second of clarity once I have stopped talking, momentarily, for pondering the grossly amusing; this vast frailty and resilience between them and us, we similar animals locked and jockeying, ramming our figurative crests for the cost of a ticket not just into the show, but to instead be geeked feature.
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