One day shortly after my eleventh birthday I got the new release, hot off the press as usual for me, of The Beatles album 'Magical Mystery Tour' which followed within six months of 'Sgt. Pepper's.' As I was listening to John Lennon singing Magical Mystery Tour I grew more curious as he referred to kicking Edgar Allan Poe. What could that possibly mean? I was to find out that Poe was once rich, but had a string of such bad luck that he never recovered. He died in a gutter.
Yes, his writings may be selling very well now, and Poe would be rich today if he were alive, but all the success in the world was not going to save him from the poverty that lead to him taking his life back when he lived. It's the same with my writings possibly. That is, if I ever became a good writer in a different way, I might be well known, but just as poor as Poe, and a social disaster financially. How does his successful writings help Poe now, being long dead? Like myself, he left no heirs.
Poe's writings may have been written for the future ages, but it didn't help him personally when he needed the help the most from his writings so he'd recover enough financially from the poverty he was forced into.
Anyway, my curiosity got the best of me and I was to read of a writer whose depression matched my own. My introduction to literature began to take a serious turn the more I read of Poe, gradually advancing to Shakespeare at fourteen, and then some.
My introduction to formal poetry was around that tyme, but songs are poems put to music, so I'd have to go back further to a tyme when I wasn't familiar with music as well. Since one of my first memories was Harry Belafonte's 'Jamaica Farewell' at three, I'd have to take it back further, since that's the age I started developing my music library.
I hope you're ready for this. You could say it was a rather intense experience I had.
Let's see. Probably my first memory. I doubt if I was much older than several weeks old then.
Someone was bending over me to lift me up. I was wrapped in a soft white blanket rather like an extra fluffy bathroom towel.
I was being carried out of a room and into a narrow hall. It also was white. Spaced a few yards apart were soft lit ceiling lights with frosted glass.
I couldn't see very well. It was rather like the excessive blurring that was done on Stella Stevens in 'The Nutty Professor' with Jerry Lewis after he opened the door and knocked the books out of her arms. At least I could see for a change. It certainly was better than the confined darkness of before. That was so restrictive. Couldn't even stretch. At the same tyme, I was still inside of something, just larger. What was it? And what are all the objects around me? What are these moving things? What's carrying me? Who am I? What's going on? And what is this long object with blunt ends on it? It seems to be-me? Oh no. I'm a mortal again?
As these thoughts flashed through my mind, the mortal carrying me, turned out to be the mother, turned into a room and stopped at the threshold. Just before she turned, the nurse sitting at a receptionist desk behind a panel looking area looked up and pointed with a pencil end to the door to the right.
Three objects, other mortals, stood up as another two mortals, a man and his small son, looked at the mother and myself. They didn't stand up, just sat and waited for someone else. The room had two windows. They had square panes, four across, two on the bottom, two on the top. The window to the right was closed, but the window to the left was partially opened.
When the three figures rose, I gave out a mental groan. I knew they were related to my future, and it was very bad news. Those three figures were my father, my older sister and brother.
I can't say that I was thinking in any language as such. It was more symbols. I didn't know what language was, nor had I heard any that I could remember right then. I was able to detect the body language of the others, and with accuracy.
There was no language for my thinking. I had no way of knowing what I was seeing, as I didn't know the words to describe a window, window panes, people, a hallway, a green floor, etc., etc. It was my arm and hand I was seeing as attached to myself, with the fingers at the end.
This actually took less than a minute in the tyme allotment. It's trying to describe everything as I saw it, the memories of what I was thinking, that takes up so much tyme.
The brother and the mother, later to be known as the Butchdyke as she became a macho man, acted together in putting forth mental tortures that would haunt me to years to come. The haunts are still there, but I've harnessed them better than before.
It was forever a struggle to avoid the horrors they tried to pull on me mentally. I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to get them to be at least a friend to me. No go. I finally gave it up as a lost cause.
There comes a tyme when you'll finally realize that after a certain point, when you've done all you could, all you can do is let go, and never look back. You have your own life to live. You aren't getting any younger, and you're wasting what tyme you have left chasing after rainbows, pies in the sky that remain non-existent.
You may be wondering now how such a memory could take place. Smell. The "ol' Factory." When the Ol' Factory was stimulated with the exact chemical combination that reproduced the smell in the hospital at that tyme, the memory occurred that reproduced that particular event. It was the day I was discharged from the hospital, and the same day that a nurse in charge of me gave me my name-Heather.
It was one thing to name a dead baby Mergatroid, but not a live one. Knowing the name the Butchdyke had for me, the nurse came up with a better name, rather rare.
A Physically intense experience took place with my second memory. (Are you sure you really want to know all of this?)
I was several weeks old because I was born barely alive and I had to be nursed back to health. That took several weeks, and then I was handed over freely to the same ones who wanted me dead. The child before me was stillborn because the mother managed to successfully kill that one. She almost succeeded with me.
I was walking beside the Butchdyke starting to go down the basement stairs. The fag was behind us. It was dim, almost dark because the father and his friend, Stanley Goslin, were in the darkroom developing black and white pictures. It was a smaller darkroom built into a section of the basement along the wall and to the left from the stairs. I was lifted up and thrown over the rickety stair banisters. On the way down to the floor, I twisted, and saw the look of pure evil on the Butchdyke's face, and happiness on the fags. I landed on a skate key that cracked my skull in the upper front, destroying my ability to speak properly. That's how I acquired aphasia.
No, I can't prove any of it. It's my word against the Butchdyke and the Fag's, anyway. If they ever knew of it, they'd deny it, I'm sure. If you were the criminal, you'd do the same. I wouldn't want to anyway. I have no communication with those insect-soul people and I haven't had for over ten years. No, I never want to have any communication openings again. No, I don't miss them. I do miss the olde days back then when I was alone, spending the majority of my days outdoors, being physically active as I'd bodysurf a couple hours, take a six mile run, walk ten miles, and take a bicycle ride of eighty miles or so in the same day. That's what I miss. My knee is so bad now that I can't do those things so much anymore, and I can never run again. No? Any doctor who checks my knee and then looks into my file will tell you the same thing. I cried the last day of my run. It hurt so bad I could barely walk.
I used to body surf so much, that when I came out, I would be exhausted and couldn't stand up. Some of the waves I would catch were major thumpers. They were fixed on a rinse cycle. The more 'gentle' but rough waves were on a wash cycle.
I spent about seventeen years just being outside. I worked when the sun was gone. Then I'd work on my hobbies, put my music on and relax, unless one of the parents interfered, which they did quite a bit. I preferred not being around until well after the sun went down, so the worst parent would be asleep.
Yes, I know. I sound heartless. Had you also been so tortured as I was, forced to live the life I had, you might feel differently. I don't treat others anything near what I was treated like.
I have no children of human gender because mostly I fear I'll somehow manage to abuse them as I was abused. Even if I caught myself after the first few seconds, that's enough to cause some damage. When I was ten, before 'Sgt. Pepper's' came out, I swore I'd never have children. I suppose that sounds too young to you to make such a decision. I had been debating the issue since I was two, so I had nine years already in my decision that was made firm, or firmer, after eleven. I was still technically a virgin when I had the tubal ligation, at the Butchdyke's insistence since she didn't want any of my heirs to come forth to contest any will of hers. No one was going to force children upon myself. Whenever anyone insists that I should have children, or should have had any, and they press the issue, I make any continued visits short with them.
So there you have it, an experience before I was aware of or familiar with poetry; or language for that matter.