Tricks of the mind

Often, drifting on the edge of sleep, or
wakefulness, I am visited by ghosts.
Diaphanous images floating across memory,
lost to the passage of years, but now found.
As after a rain, a desert springs to life,
there grow long dormant seeds, friends and
lovers, words and deeds, sorrow and gladness,
pain and pleasure, all the dichotomies
of life resolved to join together again.
I find them a reassuring comfort, they are
glimpses at treasures buried by the mind’s
age, cloistered in a monks habit, hooded
by the cloth of years, gliding for an encounter
to shine their life’s lantern light upon my path,
for a moment pushing back gathering darkness,
then fading toward a sunset, into forgotten time.

©2013, Donald Harbour

Little things can drive you crazy

The first time I saw them
they didn’t seem to be there
but, there they were. Shadows and wisps
like trails of smoke from a camp
fire. They left no impressions
just visitation. Their little tracks
hard to catch with the eye, hard to
see in the flash of a second, yet
as I write there is one now. Spirits of
age gliding at the periphery of vision.
I thought I was going crazy, being
driven mad by some unknown challenge
to my sanity. When I sat quietly, musing
about life one would jump into my
awareness startling me, snatching
at me for attention then, “bama lama
ding dong,” it was gone, disappeared.
Even when I closed my eyes they would
drift across the retina or was it
a hurried neural flight through ganglia?
One cannot know such things as fact,
not until you are subjected to their
nagging appearance. I went to my local
MD pill pusher for help. A cur dog slinking
into his office with tail tucked between
my legs. Waving me into an examination
room I saw streamers fly off his fingertips.
The fear in me said, “beware he may be
their master.” I was barely able to choke
back the urge to fall prostrate on the clinic floor
grabbing the hem of his medical smock and
adorning it with sloppy tear filled kisses.
Such is the life of a grown man fawning for
relief from mental peril. After receiving the
obligatory examination of all my orifices
doc proceeded to obliged me nodding and smiling
through my explanation of my predicament.
Why is it that my near hysterical ranting would
give him amusement? “Can ya hep me doc, hep,
hep me doc?” “Why, sure can pilgrim, floaters.”
If you are over fifty, you know about floaters.
They are those little voices you hear when you
are all alone, only they are visual voices and
they are with you all the time, for life. Docs
advice, “deal with it.” Damn there’s a whole
family of them strolling across my left eye.
“Hey guys, I can’t say your visit is welcome.
Are you staying long?”

Copyright: 2010, Donald Harbour