Found in a Pile of Stuff

I recently found this in a black binder that had been given to me in rehab to hold exercise worksheets and short booklets on the symptoms and treatments of minor head injuries. I wrote while sitting in my wheelchair in the hallway outside of the occupational therapy room, waiting for my session to begin. It seems like more of a thought process than a poem, per se...which is why it loses cohesion toward the end. As far as I can remember, no one asked me to count backward by seven...I think I just used it as a stand in for the strange arbitrary numbers they asked me to put on things as a measure of my condition...but it's entirely possible that they did, it is not unlikely, and I was pretty out of it. I put it here without polishing or rewrites for posterity and morbid curiosity.



Back from 100 by seven,
Innocently tasked.
How do you measure, and what does it mean?
Concentrate, you're 29--
It's just subtraction.
Are you up to snuff?
Snuff: a universal constant.
Remember 4th grade?
You stayed inside for recess.
You were slow counting the beans and cups.
Now, with snuff on the line,
Can't you count them faster?
Don't you want to go outside?
Under their roof it's their standard.
They hold the bar
And decide your relative height.
How tall do you think you are?
It is irrelevant, they have instruments for that.
Just tell them you're bad at math,
They will give you a different test.
After all, this is for you.
This is your time,
Your life,
Your snuff.
They just need to make sure
You know that.
So, count.






If I ever kept a diary, I imagine the entries would look a lot like this...this is sort of how my brain lays things out. I have a difficult time expressing intangible feelings in prose...cryptic pseudo poems are my prime mode of expression...which makes it even more difficult to convey my thoughts to others. I just hope they figure out the puzzle.