Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Mon Fair Levo,

I wakened from an albuterol dream to write you. The past two weeks have been filled with the most terrifying and profound dreams and awarenesses of my lifetime. I remember a face I saw several days ago. It is possibly the most perfect face I have ever seen on a human being. Naturally it was the face of a woman. She was a young RN who was tending me in intensive care. In keeping with my new policy, or maybe it is old, of letting no detail of life go unappreciated, I scrawled a note to the girl, telling her how beautiful I thought she was. I feared that she would be embarrassed or put off by my rapt description of her beauty. She was easily as beautiful as a young Elizabeth Taylor, somewhere between Black Beauty and Butterfield 8 with a forehead as perfectly vaulted as a chapel, a sculpted nose drawing to the pristine bow of her lips. But she accepted my admiration with innocence and by the next day the nurses were all calling her, 'the lovely Anu.' It is always remarkable to me how people respond to the simplest and most honest observations. It is important that we mirror each other in this way. Anu gave me pain medication whenever I requested it. The world appreciates being appreciated.

I hasn't been an easy two weeks. My body and spirit has been tested to every extreme. I have suffered every pain and humiliation imaginable and some I never would have imagined of my own accord. Besides having my ass wiped by the most beautiful women in the world, my voice, the actual voice of a poet, is totally gone, vanished. I still don't know what they did with my Adam's Apple. As soon as I find it, I'll auction it on Ebay. I have been reduced to communicating my most fundamental needs by means of scribbling with a magic marker on a paintboard. I erase these enigmatic notes with a velvet sock before I can scrawl the next one. Of course I can't keep up with my thoughts and I lose my place and get confused, etc. You have the last known examples of what my voice must have sounded like.

They have been giving me some pretty heavy drugs, which is the only reason I submitted myself to their abuse in the first place. Narcotics are among the few remaining pleasures available to me in this life. I can't even jack-off without dislodging my urinary catheter. I pee by means of a valve. These drugs have provided some pretty wild and wooly dreams or observances, it's many times hard to tell which. The first day after they removed my larynx, one of the young doctors in the ICU clinic threw an impromptu albuterol party. There were about thirty hospital employees sitting all over the place in positive zona incognita for half an hour or so and then it was back to business as unusual. I had never experienced this class of inhalant before. It's quite remarkable with profound hallucinations. An entire culture seems to have evolved around the experience. I think it may have been a factor a few days later when I went totally round the bend and ripped all my tubing and IV's and monitors etc, out. It's amazing what extreme conditions can do to the mind and spirit. I'll write more specifically of it later. Now, I'll only remind you that with the proper manipulation of pain and air supply and drugs and diet, they can make you believe anything they choose. curse your nation or your mother or your god or anything else you might vainly hold sacred or dear. I suppose it does us good from time to time to be reminded of this.

I'll write more of my progress as I get some strength back.

Invalidly yours,
Dexter