JANE BLAIKIE

 

Progressive bulbar palsy

 
doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue — matter of fact, trips up the tongue. 
It’s a bad trip, a maverick bus, terminus 14 to 18 months from diagnosis. 
First the tongue, then travelling south, it will take his breath away. 
 
Explain it ‘like Stephen Hawking’, except Stephen’s on the slow coach, 
the double-decker, by way of a scenic route. Dave rides express 
 
but he’s hauled the cord, wrangled some extra time (a year or more). 
Call it hippy shit — visualisations — every cloud, plant, landscape 
a metaphor for the stem cells he knows his brain can make. 
 
Yesterday’s cloud, an actual one, becomes a spreading, tessellating 
fibrous network of new cells that reach affected limbs, the failing tongue. 
On his way home from friends, an oncoming truck carries a tangle of dead 
 
supplejackdeparting damaged neurons. Later he injects green tea extract 
(home-made) through a peg in his gut, and tincture of pine-tree bark. 
But coffee has the last line: It helps a lot. 
 
 

Tongue burglar

 
After the bell ringer 
                                    Drinking, not drunk 
A car stops 
                                    Our hearts stop 
With its lights on 
                                    When you cough 
Brighting the house 
                                    Last words 
This no one 
                                    Noise words 
Bangs the flap 
                                    Laughter remains 
Looks inside 
                                    Then drives off 
 

Green tea

 

I’ve been cheered up a lot by proactivity such as making green tea extract — it helps me escape a fatalistic attitude.

after I get the peg in my gut (to feed) 
I begin to inject green tea 
more or less proven to help 
I aim for equiv. 10 cups a day 
 
I begin to inject green tea 
caffeine content wakes me up 
I aim for equiv. 10 cups a day 
best if not hotter than 80°C 
 
caffeine content wakes me up 
sometimes I add gin 
best if not hotter than 80°C 
it helps dissolve flavonoids 
 
sometimes I add gin 
benefits for auto-immune disease 
it helps dissolve flavonoids 
addicted to it now 
 
benefits for auto-immune disease 
feeling not quite right 
addicted to it now 
too many visits to the toilet 
 
feeling not quite right 
today I take 60% of previous 
too many visits to the toilet 
feel better 
 
today I take 60% of previous 
more or less proven to help 
feel better 
after I get the peg in my gut (to feed) 

After each visit

 
After each visit with you the texture 
of light shifts — slows, tilts, sharpens — 
like the opening bars of fever. 
 
I watch another bad Beethoven movie 
trapped in a script with Ed Harris. 
He must ask the fictional female 
to wash his combed belly, I must 
watch his waxed butt. 
 
Like you, Beethoven spoke with notebooks, 
friends competed to help. Ideals, 
the Enlightenment, lit everything. 
 
Doesn’t make you Beethoven, 
with his blood-laced shit, belly cut 
and drained. 
 
In his Ninth, all men become brothers. 
I always cry when I hear its ode, 
like a rat in a maze hearing the note 
for shock. 
 
You say, ‘Everything has sentience’ 
and ‘We have lost respect’. 
 
When your catheter leaks, all 
I can think to say is, 
‘Buddhists drink the stuff.’ 
 
Outside light flickers, 
celluloid burns through 
to the Ninth’s exquisite pain, melting 
back to my father’s anger, jumping 
to the ode. Jumping back to you. 
 

Outlook

 
He’d like to be living in a shack by the sea. 
Someone weeds his tiny courtyard, his urban ward. 
He notices the birds visit less often. 
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane Blaikie completed an MA at the IIML in 2012 with a poetry folio titled ‘The Neurology Department’. Its opening section is about the Wellington artist, designer and gallerist Dave Kent who was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease in 2009. Lines in the poems in italics are taken from notebooks that Dave has used to communicate with by writing after he became mute.