Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 1. May 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
All the precious time
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Andi Snelling
I am looking for my brain this
dressing-gowned afternoon.
Was it the neon strip lights over veiny
hands as he counted down from 10? The countless nuclear testing testing 1, 2,
3-I-was-not-free inside me.
The two hours every morning of the last
bottomless years hooked up, my body flooded and drained, crawling for change,
just the same.
My ADHD OCD come fly with me there and
here under the trap door of nowhere I stare and stare then scatter like glitter
stuck in a spread. I miss fairy bread.
I was suddenly dyslexic for 2 or so
years. The evidence my diary held as I scramble-egged my sentence spells. The
herbs flipped that, though sometimes numbers still fry.
My focus was always razor. Now it’s….
I am gifted and drifted.
Is it all the social needier?
I boom and bust myself all the precious
time. I can’t stop running even though I can.
A friend typed my script for me when I
couldn’t. I dictated each angelic word. That very writing almost won an award
people care about, but it went to Patricia Cornelius who I love.
I often feel half the clever I was.
What used to be action and able is now
dawdle and dash as phone reminders clash and scrap paper lists of lists about
things about things sit in useless compete. My table, bench, seat of crinkled
meringues I still can’t eat.
The deadline is always defined by a
sense of time I just don’t seem to find… anymore. The dead end of cognitive
bend. I don’t want to defend or depend.
Here I continue to rise in my fall, wanting it all.