Nerved
I’ve been nerved up. The nerve expands to infinity. I can invite others to join my nerve, to write in India ink across the surface of cells. The nerve connects eye to brain. The brain elaborates its connections.
I’m thinking a lot about nerves these days. My son crashed his bike on a mountain pass, got flung against a steel guard rail, cut all the tendons in his arm, cut all the nerves. He can’t invite others to join his nerve, but the doc put him back together. The doc knows that curve. Bless the guard rail, he says. Bless the doctor who saves lives, and refuses to cut life from the womb.
My penal record rolls out before me, a carpet trod red by those who arrive with babes in their bellies and murder in their hearts. In modern America every perversion is permitted, but I have been criminalized, I, who live in righteousness, my “self” hardly a self, merely a piston stroke of obedience to God. That’s why He saved my son.
The protocols of arrest and imprisonment are like the procedures of Abortion. See me on the steps of the iniquitous clinic, my face impassive, my clothes inadequate for the weather, which turns ever colder. My sign says Life. My shadow runs before me like the beginning of a flood, like a living stream of conscience, like a bicycle flying out of control.
