Dancing in the Dark

Cant start a fire without a spark

Bruce Springsteen

Maybe controls always skating the edge

but once the C word comes down,
worlds fragile, splinter into nonsense,
cacophony, baroques dissonant retracted
--freeways, friends, infidelities
centrifuged on the slow, hazy spit
of how, why, what
onco eco ocean marrow no me
Knowledge is power, half-right Sixties mantra
though nomograms and stats were once more
alien than UFOs over Phoenix
tunnel-vision actuaries
now allies in hope, along with household gods,
salvific benzos, Ativan and Klonopin
the beta-blocker, Aztec Inderal.
The Divided Line would be pan, Plato
pharma ultimate OCD phantom
inside-out the (then) unspoken autonomic
nervous system, primitive brain stem binary
as bar codes, spiraling anxiety epinephrine rush
panic pounding the heart, not enough O2 in,
chest roils and bubbles, cascading worst scenarios.
Knowings come a long way, poor thing,
from its invented Ur-story, a bit inflated
epistemic kamikaze poster snake:
articulate, seductive, coiled around
the tree-trunk of knowledge, Good and Evil,
then by Zeus, the Greeks, it twined its way onto
the brand itselfthe Caduseusand from that
founding moment on, seculalalala,
medical knowings been a stage, a pas de deux,
itself a crude differential but fine-tuned,
unhinged jaw, a gauntlet of gross tests:
blood, bone, and sinew, liver, lung,
pelvic CT scan, to decree:
no evidence of spread.