a latter-day Dexter Riley

By October my body had left me.  Bereft from a kind of sickness of inevitability, I had been at odds with my flesh for months now.  My consciousness, my being, my soul felt a faithlessness to my physical form that was self-protective and a little numb.  And the material structure of me--the corpos, the form--felt a crushing alienation of self that made flight desirable.  Flight and night and dreams.  I became in the wee hours of  a moonless room a kind of ghost in reverse, my physical form rising, slipping into black leather clogs, shuffling across the floor, scuffing stairs, then out the door into the garden, the alley, the street, the city beyond...

Gone.

Divided.

In my bed, my soul transformed.  A metallic baptism, a Kafkaesque caftan, a bionic experiment (gone awry) in a post-science age:  the iron-plating of the emptiness I had become had started.  By morning I would be the hardened crab nebulae encased in questions and chromium.  This is no tragedy.  I became a latter day Dexter Riley, knee deep in speculation in an electric storm.  "Why the boots and whence the shame?"  For its place, and for its purpose, these things--this robotic ocean of feelings, this compendium of sex and poetry, the empathic answer, the subtle art of silence--are the shaman's logic, the priest's discipline.  The dynamic of that relationship--confessor and supplicant (for example)--is the magic of eye contact between one who is living, freely and graciously, and the one who is dying (by whatever means).

And so it was, in those days, every one who approached me was satisfied and ratified by the "honest" ease of the reflection that met them.  They saw and eagerly stared into their own slightly distorted features.  The image was smiling off my polished surface in perfect deflection, bouncing back into the sky.  My body had left me--I assume into heaven--rising to the responsibility of my gifts and lifting voices, noisily bragging to angels and such about this long program of humiliation and shame.  Here on Earth, I can only whisper, still hesitant, hoping for a new skin,  a new armor.  The bionic promise is still reserved for astronauts.  There is no certainty and there is no confidence where there is no hope.