Self-Contained
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
Animated bag of seawater,
(as are we all)
I voyage the far reaches
holding a hollow shell
as navigator at my ear
and sloping pen as mast
that exudes the cursive trail
I follow to internal healing lands
found wonderfully close at hand!
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Flipping the Script
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
“There is a pleasure sure in being mad,
which none but madmen know.” — John Dryden, “The Spanish Friar”
My pencil tip lingers
within a hairsbreadth of the paper,
snagged upon a fragment of thought
or perhaps the sunrise colors
spreading like breakfast jam
across the dawn.
This is that special time of day
when the shroud of isolation
that has so tightly bound my life
opens to the proverbial coat
of many colors, completely
expansive, inclusive, and free.
So I don that redeeming coat
and let it speak for me
as it spreads a balm of logic,
dream, and reason across the
healing poultice of my page.
Oh, but now the mists have shifted
and I see that there’s no paper or pen,
just a hallucination
of me, the great poet,
gazing into the demolished colorwheel
of his institutional breakfast plate: egg yolk,
cranberry juice, and orange marmalade,
all dripping from his filthy glasses,
while someone (is it me?) rhythmically
chants and screams the alien phrase:
”Speak again, O Zarathustra!”
Then, perhaps by happenstance,
or more likely by design,
an announcement breaks
this latest trance:
”Medication time!”
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About the Author
Roy Wahlberg, OID# 103429. Born: 11/20/1951. Life sentence: 1976. His brain later determined to have been so ravaged by early life disease, even hydrocephalus surgery was long denied as pointless (as it proved to be). Ultimately, however, miraculous “compensations” emerged from his brain deterioration and epilepsy treatment: the “Grandma Moses Effect” of late-life artistic drive. For him this took form as musicophilia, hypergraphia, and compulsive versification–the three stabilizing legs of his intellectual stool (both the furniture kind and his overall function, at times a bit scatological).
With autism, dysphasia (verbal deficits), and attention/memory scores in the bottom 5-7%, only through writing can Roy achieve a solid and continual sense of self–that essential ingredient of normal life that is otherwise entirely missing or only flimsily maintained. Halting and forgetful in speech, it is writing alone that releases his mind into smooth and tireless eloquence as the logical thread is held reliably before him by the medium.
Perhaps most importantly, writing allows Roy to find deep and meaningful solace in his almost unbroken solitude, instantly expanding his tiny cell from a lonely cage of despair into cognitive banquet halls filled with infinite imaginative possibilities, a doorway for the spirit, and an inexhaustible, cathartic feast of dream and reason. In many ways, and much more than most, Roy must write in order to truly live — making the writing, as he sees it (though happily so) practically ALL that exists of him.
Two-way email communication with Roy is possible through the website Jpay.com, searching for him as Roy Wahlberg 103429.
His mailing address is:
MCF-Stillwater
970 Pickett Ave. N.
Bayport, MN 55003