Roy Wahlberg
NUMB COMFORT
It was just another Dr. Zhivago morning:
all white winter-palace icy-mist crystalline.
The blood-spill crew had been out early --
one inmate and three guards injured.
A strange ratio, still –
It was just another Dr. Zhivago morning:
the breakfast fruited oatmeal cereal
steamed appealingly.
* * *
LINGERING
My pencil tip lingers
within a hairsbreadth of the paper,
snagged on a fragment of thought
or perhaps the sunrise colors spreading
like fine breakfast jam across the dawn.
This is that special time of day
when the shroud of isolation
that has so bound up my life
opens to the proverbial coat
of many colors – completely
expansive, inclusive and free.
So I don that redeeming coat
and allow it to speak for me
as it spreads a feast of logic,
dream and reason across the
mensal vestments of my page.
* * *
RELEASE FROM THE HOLE
From months in cold isolation
I stepped into full-force summer
with a gasp
like sleep-walking
into the torrid slap
of hurricane
equatorial surf.
I felt lifted up
on an altar of sunlight
to absorb a world
turned primordial:
flowers and trees,
butterflies and bees,
all turning their sentient
smiles toward me.
The walls had become
a charmed circle
where in a far corner
a chorus of wild dandelions
sang their hearts out for me.
I gazed straight upward to see
a plein-air painted waterscape
where passing clean thru was
a flowing cerulean stream
of cloud-petalled sky that
with puffy but clear eyes
peered down at me in the
most distinct sympathy.
Even the bricks seemed
to lean back a bit, turning
my thoughts toward Turner's
consummate portrayal of light
and Constable's "I have been skying."
How could I now do anything
but, having so sharply known
the sudden esthetic beauty
and shock of raw nature
from a counterfeit world of
electronic lights and locks?
Roy Wahlberg. Born: 11/20/1951. Life sentence: 1976 . His brain later determined to have been so ravaged by early-life disease,
even hydrocephalus surgery was denied as pointless. Ultimately, though, magical "compensations" emerged from his brain deterioration and epilepsy
treatment: the "Grandma Moses Effect" of late-life artistic drive, musicophilia, hypergraphia, and compulsive versification. With autism, aphasia
(verbal deficits), and attention/memory scores of 5-7%, Wahlberg feels continuity of existence only while writing. To him, it is life itself.
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