DIPSOMANIAC SESTINA
For years you replenished dopamine to lush
levels
in tropical synaptic zones, flooded riotous
limbic rivers
with Jack Daniels. The dendritic pathways
of the flow
deltaed on a corpus callosum so awash in
the sediment
of acetylcholine that a white hemispheric
substance,
once cerebral, grew base, grew stupid and
profane.
Behind every point bar lies a levee. Deeper
in lie profane
swampy syndromes and manias dependent on
chemical levels,
driven by genetic hierarchies that lead to
substance
abuse. Choose your poison; its availability
measured in rivers,
if you know where to look. Beware the
muddy sediment.
Swim only within the bars where you find
a clear flow.
Had we scanned the corpus callosum, evidenced
a flow
of hypometabolic distress; your PET jealously
profane…
We might have called you something different
had we seen the sediment,
this disorder larger than simple drunk, had
we recognized the levels
that propelled you, diving head first, into
murky gator riddled rivers.
If we are guilty at all, it’s for this simple
lack of substance.
But you… You found substance where there
was no substance.
You panned the gaps and eddies of the raphe
nuclei’s flow
for golden serotonin nuggets. You built
dopamine damned rivers.
In our mouths, your name tasted like loss,
tasted of the profane.
Your intellect failed. You sunk to
weighted levels;
just so much suspended erratic against the
sediment
of our lives. You became the boozy sediment
present at holiday gatherings; a stinking
substance
tracked in on someone’s soul, no one daring
to level
a complaint regarding the odorous flow.
You brokered the thing we denied. You
were profane
in your adoration of besotted rivers.
You were our Stanley hunting Livingston, finding
the source of rivers
where you were caught in Victoria’s plunge
pool sediment,
tangled in the meander of a floodplain so
profane
you couldn't find your way out, couldn't
find the substance
of the self that would track into safer flows.
Finally, there were only so many levels
below sea level you were willing to travel,
only so many rivers’
muddy flows you would swim, abraded by coarse
sediment.
Some dives profane the sport, yours gave
it substance.
Copyright 1999, Pamela Moore Dionne
Pamela Dionne received a 1998 Centrum Poetry Residency and Artist Trust
GAP Grant for her manuscript A BODY OF WORDS: THE POETRY OF GRAY'S ANATOMY.
Her work appears in Raven Chronicles, Shenandoah and
Synapse. She is a 1999 participant in the Jack Straw
Writers Program and Seattle Poetry Festival and performs at artsEdge with
Joan Laage and Chuck Smart the weekend of June 25th - 27th, 1999.