You Will Find Me Much Changed

After my brain injury I felt myself at a kink with the world.

After my brain injury I was no longer in tune with the sensibilities of the age.

After my brain injury I said things like, ‘Fiction is over. Tell us the truth.’

After my brain injury I no longer found wonder in the universe.

After my brain injury I shrugged at butterflies, rainbows, the aurora australis, poison dart frogs, the apparent truth that the golden ratio presented the pressures upward and downward of the prices of stocks.

After my brain injury I obsessed over minutiae, such as the correct pronunciation of words, such as ‘minutiae’.

After my brain injury I confused the bilabial nasal /m/ and the alveolar fricative sibilant /s/.

After my brain injury I walked with a lisp.

After my brain injury few could tell when I was joking or laughed at my jokes when they could.

After my brain injury I separated from my wife, arranging joint custody, which we did not call custody, and an agreeable division of assets, which we had some other mealy-mouthed term for also.

After my brain injury I found faces difficult to recognise, which had been the case before my brain injury.

After my brain injury I found the arts self-aggrandising, deceitful, flavourless, which ditto.

After my brain injury I was much unchanged.

After my brain injury, my short-term memory function declined, or continued to decline, but at a faster rate, or at the same rate if viewed against a logarithmic y-axis.

After my brain injury I was completely unchanged is another way to phrase it.

After my brain injury it was discovered I had fabricated the brain injury for attention. Some were unsurprised, which saddened me. Some thought the whole thing had been performance art, which disgusted me.

After the onset of my early onset dementia, I was wonderfully unawares, the onset being insidious.

After my diagnosis of early onset dementia nobody believed me because of the whole brain injury fabrication.

After I lost all neurologically integrity, panting, gibbering, spasming, muttering and becoming a great burden to those around me, I found no solace in music.

After my death I was in a foul mood, and barked my opinion to anyone who would listen that opera was long-winded and unpleasant.

After I no longer existed and thousands of years had passed and no one remembered me and no record remained of anything I had ever been involved with and it made no sense for me to be a subject to which a predicate in the present tense was attributed, I whistled that tolerable bit of Madame Butterfly and considered whether I should add a caveat, in regards of my earlier attitude on opera, but who could I tell other than you, also non-existent at that point, and of course I no longer existed either, so I may as well have been telling you it before we were both born, if you follow, and nor had I existed when I expressed the first opinion, so it was best just to accept there was no going forward with the whole enterprise.

Nick Ascroft's fifth collection of poems is getting fatter and preliminarily titled, The Stupefying. Lives in Wellington.