Trance?

Apparently I spent large chunks of senior year in a coma, or drunk, or living as someone else...I don't know. I am sifting through all these files I have in a folder marked "Henry and Clara," and trying to see if there's anything worth recycling as I crack WTTAN (that's "We Things That Are Now") open again in earnest....and most of them are so unfamiliar to me that it is surreal. Not only do I have no recollection of ever seeing them before, but I literally cannot conceive of having written them.

The weirdest thing, though, is some sort of poem that is stuck in between two rough scenes in a file called "to send ben." (As if the title doesn't reveal how old it is, the date says 7/2006. Wowza.) I have NO idea where it came from. I know I didn't write it. But I just have no idea where it came from. I assume the inclusion of the name 'Henry' in it was one of the reasons I noticed it; a Google search is fruitless. I have absolutely no idea. I suppose there's a chance it could be from the novel "Henry and Clara," but I don't think so. I read it over and over and am totally, completely puzzled and weirded out. The line about the rat is something I could have written, because that happened to me once. And the line about the three-legged dog is feeling really familiar. I don't fucking know! It's making me feel really insane.

Anyway, here it is. You don't know what it is, do you?

We went to the Albany Fair

And we went into the Tent of Wonder and Horror

Saw the horse-hair bearded lady and the Tartar with his head drilled full of holes

A three-legged dog; he mostly lay in the corner

A rat the size of a pig- I think it was not actually a rat

A sword-swallower covered in tattoos

But at the end, a pair of girls

Who looked to be embracing

Arms around each other tightly, so tightly, that one couldn’t turn her head to look out of the window she sat behind

Stitched together, flesh sewn to flesh, like a cruel joke made real by the punishing hand of an unkind God

My heart broke for them

To never be apart from another

But as I looked I thought

Might I like to be so with my Henry?

If I had to be so

It would be him I would choose to be knit up with

To never part, never look away

I realized I was wrong

I looked at the girls and could see only the love that they shared

That was keeping them together

Without their love, they could walk away from each other in an instant