The Enchanted Bus of Existence

Which sounds as if it should have Harry Potter and... placed in front of it, I know.

But yes, the Wonderful and Enchanted Oak has the wheel this week, and she has asked us to ponder our existence.
You can read all about it, and find the other existentialists, here:
http://chrisalba-enchantedoak.blogspot.com/2010/11/alive-and-glad-of-it.html

Bottom line, I am who I am because my father was Richard James Palmer and my mother was Dorothy Mary Pike. Everything else has only been icing on cake after that.
But I have a lot of Dad poems, and some Mum ones.
And a lot of big things have happened to me in my 47 years on this planet, some of which I've written about. But strangely enough what many would consider one of the biggest I have never written a poem about - and that's the car accident that killed me. The story is here if you wish to know more.
http://titusthedog.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-response-to-stevens-meme.html

The hardest thing in writing about the accident is that I can't actually remember it - my memory is very hazy of about 1/2 an hour beforehand, and then completely gone for the actual accident itself, and a good while after.
And I think I 'dealt' with all that followed once I was allowed to regain consciousness, and after the morphine weeks, by completely blanking the majority of my recovery. Being called the 'fat cripple' by one particularly sensitive brother does stick in my mind a bit, however.
I think it was the facial deformity and scarring, and the huge balloon on my right leg (fat rupture, dealt with by liposuction in its very earliest days in this country) that most upset me. I think.
One day, perhaps, I'll understand how what happened then has made me now. But that day has not yet arrived, so in the meantime here's the poem, without the understanding.

And a photo like you used to get on 'Ask the Family' - What is it?


Scar Story

Here is one of my fine scars,
long held to be the ugliest.
I note, with interest,
it is no longer as ugly
as once it was.
I have not peered at it enough lately;
it has changed, as they do.

The beautiful scars got apparent purpose.
I am fond of the tribal markings on one cheek,
and regret somewhat the scar revisions
that lowered profile.
Still, this hidden misfit has kinship with the rest.
They share their birth date.

I have lost the accident,
were it ever there. I was killed.
There was no Walk toward the Light,
no Stay away from the Light,
no, I only recall being at the ceiling
looking down, seeing body,
people in faded blue, and face masks.
The radiographer later told me
I had been sick on her;
I do not recall that.

Thus my joy in scars,
sole prominences now
so minor then, on the trauma scale.
They have their little survivor lives.
There is debris in each one –
glass, tarmac, dust, paint –
which debris keeps them vital.
Should I get run down
they swell, redden, revolt
as the mood takes them.
The glass beneath an eyelid
sometimes blooms a blood vessel
and shows purple for a while.

I am glad of this: they tell me stories
of happenings then.
What sliced that skin, when,
in my many trajectories
into, over and under
the vehicles in my path?
I ponder, and piece together.
A good, fine fiction my scars are.