The Mri

The MRI October 17, 2003, circa 6:50am while blow-drying my hair after a shower, my right arm collapsed, flopped to my side, dangling like a flaccid penis. The CNS(Central Nervous System) failed to effect commands to the arm. Paralysis. This earned me a $45.00 ambu-ride to emerg. Paralysis remained for 3hrs. CNS eventually regained majority control in the following few hours, & residual control returned over days. It was a Transient Ischemic Attack. A blood clot grid-locked in the brain, asphyxiated a nerve that sensates the right arm. The following functions failed: Writing my signature Holding coins, soap bars MasturbationTurning door knobs Opening jars Keyboarding & mousing Buttoning a shirt Nose-picking Prostate assessing Tying a knot The device is a huge & powerful magnet. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Metal objects must be removed. People with metal pins in their body are questioned -- some can never go into the machine, nor near the machine. It is in a room within a larger room segregated to a small section of the hospital. I am asked if I have ever been a welder, or otherwise worked in a job whereby a small bit of metal could have been embedded in the eye, which could be ripped out by the magnet. Pacemakers are forbidden. So I am dressed in a thin flannel gown, laid on my back onto a narrow table. A prop is inserted under my knees. As I lay there I begin to feel a surge of anxiety. Plugs are inserted into my ears. Props are placed on either side of my head -- immobilizing it. I am positioned to a cross-haired bull's eye.. The anxiety level rises. A small cage is pulled down over my head. I can't swallow because my throat is dead dry -anxiety rules. I talk about it with one of the two technicians. I ask for water. She brings some. I lay there immobile; take two sips, take a deep breath and say "OK". The tray on which I lay slowly smoothly inserts me into the machine, into a featureless chamber. There is breathing space, only. Panic is suppressed. My throat remains moist. I continue to swallow. Good. A woman's disembodied voice advises that a session will begin for a minute's duration. A thumping sound begins. There are no bodily sensations other than the thumping noise. The longest minute passes. The disembodied voice said I did good, It will be 3 or 4 more minutes before the next session begins. Then the voice says the next session will be 4-5 minutes duration. The tray nudges my body a few centimetres, then a new noise begins, and begins and begins and goes on goes on goes on goes on & on & on... There is a small mirror I can look into to see the two female technicians behind glass in another room fondling dials. More long minutes pass. A voice says another session of two minutes will begin. And a third unique pounding noise begins. This was endured. Endured. More long minutes pass. A voice announces another session 4 minutes long is about to commence. There were 4 beats of one pounding followed by 4 beats of a different level of pounding and so it’s repeated over and over again and again. At the end of the session, I twitched. I was seconds from pressing the panic button I had been handed. I felt suffocated. The tray moved. I was withdrawn from the machine. I sat on the table for a few moments to regain my composure. My forehead was soaked. My thighs, which had been clenched together, were sweatwet. I got off the table and took more moments to look into the chamber where my body had been. I was rattled. My hands trembled, even as I civied-up to go home. I was rattled. That is the literal description. ...

This is the poetic description: I guarantee it in writing, sign my name, I, Wally Keeler, in the 56th year of diminishing virility, hereby declare to be metal-free neither microchip nor nano-entity lurk subcutaneous; I am 100% human male, vulnerable to everything. Laid out on a tray I am inserted head-first and dry-throated anxious into the magnetic cylinder head-first up a techno logical vagina a bloodless lustless vagina I am a dildo for diagnosis by a bland gland Don't even dream of moving your eyeballs, they will blur the imaging. I'm instructed to be still to play dead to lay like an autopsy cadaver inside a bloodless vagina and comes the thrusting noise the rhythmic pounding pulse imaging my brain in molecular slices digitizing it into a multi-binary portrait Magnets compellingly attractive magnets line the bloodless vagina compellingly attractive as the bloody real illogical thing the pleasure pursuit of men sending nation onto nation to pleasure possess So I am inserted into the machine with the smooth grace of a dismissive gesture, yet its power to picture my brain excludes the weeping warm vaginas of the women I have known -for them the secretions of software that initiate poetry programs.

The vagina of modern diagnostics penetrated my head's hardware cross-hairing a pixel of enormous consequence in a troublesome artery ensuring the blood continues flooooowing into my imagination as I lay there immobile as a corpse, the scrapbook of my lovers paging in my head their vulvelour vaginas silking me milking me remains impenetrable to the mega-might of robo-cunt claustrophobia And I lay inside it stiff as a stiff, imaging the remains of my love life tent-poling the thin sheet covering me with a hard-on as insouciant as a middle finger salute.