Transcutaneous Electric Nerve Stimulation
(On Reading Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric)
This TENS machine knows its job, electric impulses
sent out at just the appropriate levels to sting
and twitch the muscles in a rhythmic cadence.
I am reading Whitman by accident or on purpose.
I have all maybes locked into each beat of me
that feeds this aching body-soul Whitman calls up,
shaman to DNA before the helix, namer of parts.
Each pulse glints in the body, a salmon thrashing
up river, caught in the leap to join where it began.
I recognize the sympathy of hand when feeling
the naked meat of the body threaded with electric.
I sense the sugar of shock licking at the walls,
the thinness of each sweetness, pain, together,
the wonder in the flow that engulfs the house.
* Andrea Porter is a member of the poetry performance group Joy of Six, which has performed in Britain and New York. She has been published in a number of poetry magazines (both paper and online) in the UK, Canada, Australia and USA. Her narrative sequence of poems Bubble was adapted as a drama for Radio 4 as a drama by the RSC dramatist Fraser Grace. She writes a fairly successful blog We liked It But Not Quite Enough – www.welikeditbutnotquiteenough.blogspot.com – and promises the agent she will get the rewrites to the novel soon. She has a full collection A Season of Small Insanities coming out with Salt Publishing in April 2009.
