Last month I had a session inside a torpedo tube, or so the MRI chamber seemed. I got to hear classic rock music and odd, Techno-like machine noises. It lasted about forty minutes, and resulted in over 500 cross-sectional views of my brain. Here is a detail from one of the pages, which I have tinted for dramatic effect:

From top to bottom, left to right, the images start at the top of my head and end at about the middle of my eyes. Since I now know almost nothing about brain anatomy I don’t know what structures, other than my eyes and the corpus callosum, are being heightened by the contrast. I knew more in grade school but have forgotten most of what I learned.

In this early stage of my drawing and poem, I’ve done thumbnails of several of the views, and have decided on the acrostic spine, MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING, and seven words and one phrase. The decision on the spine is final, even though the leftmost word, MAGNETIC, has eight letters, and the rightmost, IMAGING, has but seven; and RESONANCE has seven elements since I have RES occupy one line. Most likely I’ll use the final G of the acrostic for both lines of a final couplet, and they will rhyme, but we’ll see.

This is by no means the clunkiest acrosticization I’ve done. Once I used MARS SOUPY AL as my triple acrostic, which is a wretched pun on “marsupial” and ended up needing a line arrangement similar to a freeway overpass to five different highways. But the result was absolutely unique, with drawings of Mars and Soupy Sales and Al Pacino heading the three words, and a duck-billed platypus overlording all three. I was reasonably certain that no one had ever brought the four together, and equally certain that no one would ever know why they SHOULD be brought together, until they had seen the acrostic. And even then I imagine head-scratching and the thought “This is nuts.”  But that’s where the idea for the acrostic came from–the Duck-Billed Platypus is one of the most improbable creations on Earth, seeming to be a cut-and-paste job from several species. My poem, in my humble opinion, was a good analogue, an honorary marsupial.

The acrostic I’m working on above comes from a different place. My working intention is to poetically discuss the way that lump of fatty tissue in our skulls relates to who we are. This subject was well plumbed by the late Oliver Sacks, and if you have never had a look at The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales it is available in PDF form for a mere $2.50 US, and I also found a used hardcover, good condition,  on the Barnes & Noble site for $2.30. SO well worth it, Friends, and I hope you will find it in the library or elsewhere, if it’s not on your bookshelf already.

The words and phrase I have put into the acrostic already are subject to change, but I hope I don’t have to. If I can make them work in an array of meter and rhyme that makes sense and speaks to the subject I’ve chosen, it will be a lot like a magic trick. Stay tuned, please!