Delirium of Negation

Life was easier when I didn’t eat. I could push myself to a fog

and nothing made sense. It explained my misery. Starvation

was my objective correlative, acid in my throat a means to say

the unsaid. How silly. Miles Davis plays and I take a bite, the bile

remains deep inside, a disarmed metaphor. Pain is the thing

that shifts with context, adapts and waits like a whistle around

a neck. I’m thinking of Cotard delusion again, a syndrome in which

someone believes they have already died and must be buried at once.

Was it Michelangelo who said the effect of death defends nature 

from all human passions? In the earliest account of Cotard, 

a woman senses a light wind on her side, grows paralyzed, 

and asks for a shroud. Another patient believed she lacked

intestines, stopped eating and did die. A psychologist tells me

the power antidepressants can have on chronic pain, a redirection

the way a bullet in the arm isn’t pain in an act of war. How easy

the body bends to belief. How funny it is to be cured.