I was still the same,
                                            Knowing myself yet being someone other.
                                                                T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

The world I think comes on me when I seize
might be the one that I still live in.
Everything I call my life may well be nothing
but a partial-complex seizure,
psychomotor fit, temporal lobe epilepsy.
Those are the proper terms for claws
that rip the person, me,
from things called place and time and self,
propel what's left across some threshold
to another space.
I'm a disembodied mind,
a mindless body on its own
launched into another realm.

These are the aura telling me I'm on my way,
no turning back - grinding in the belly,
churning nausea, everything tinged yellow,
my words like someone's high on downs
speaking through the megaphone that is my throat
and then I have no words at all.

I want to tell you what it's like there:
it's as if I've woken up,
entered the life of the man who dreams me.
Sometimes I think that he's the one I used to be.
His world is heavy, feels as if a sack of rocks was hanging
off my back; my arms are pulled
as if they carry luggage packed with someone else's books.
The sadness of a life that's lost -
more weight inside my chest and head.
I'd have to be there now to know what happens.

Suddenly the fit is over. I'm booted out.
I know that I've just seized because a nausea
ripples from my center, vision's extra sharp,
the world in bright relief.
Fear searches for some distant, unknown object,
a memory of where I've been.
All memory dissolves
before I'm master of my words again.
Does this make any sense to you?

I'm like a shipwrecked sailor suddenly on shore -
Feet test the ground.
Mind looks for landmarks,
tries to match up time,
assure itself that this,
not there, is home and that
the nameless face in front of me
you say is yours is one I know.

Maybe the man that dreams me
is the me before my brain was injured
dreaming of a life like mine,
my world a product of his REM,
the passage to it hardly liminal at all.

Maybe it's not quite so simple:
he gets in bed, yawns a final sigh;
he sleeps and kindled neurons firing out of synch
create this ictal world to which he's launched.
He feels a lightness, thinks he's lost,
doesn't know that there's a me who's found,
that I'm the other dreaming him
until his seizure lets him free.