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David Macak - Lansing, MI (USA):

April 30, 2001:
(notes on my part, in progress, of a larger poem in progress...
...with apologies, and much gratitude, to Samuel R Delany)
These books "unpack, like any text, not always with what has been
    packed into them."
This is the shelf of the texts of my life and the
    lives of my sisters and brothers. My own unpacks with the
    foot-heavy type of alveolar proteinosis in my lungs, the dull, rough, and
    easily torn high rag content pages of too little serotonin in the
    volumes of my brain, nearsightedness, a hunger for salt (and a hunger,
    sometimes, to be salt),
the two boyhood scars on my hands that did not grow longer,
    in later years, as my hands grew under them, and the orchards
    of words and numbers, and what there is to know about them,
    that I walk through every day, the clouds of them that buzz
    around and in my head, that go with me wherever I go.
For most of us, the texts unpack with nearsightedness, and with IQ
    scores over a hundred. For six of us, the texts unpacked
    with muscular dystrophy; for another, Guillain-Barre syndrome; for at least two of
    us, now, cancer; for me, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, predominantly inattentive type; for
    one, ADHD, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type;
for three of us, alcoholism; for one of those, suicide; for one,
    the sure knowledge that he would die if he stayed; for two,
    the written or remembered intention to kill a parent; for most of
    us, post-traumatic stress disorder; for some of us, depression; for all of
    us, grief.
[My own unpacks too with the smile on my brother Danny's face
    at the end of a week of muscular dystrophy summer camp in
    the middle seventies; with the surprising muscularity of the huge, brown animal
    of the Mississippi River when I saw it for the first time;
    with working on the roof of the new porch in the summer
    of 1976, and the smell that rose from the wood like the
    finest bread;
with the imagined roar of the sun's furnace, and the imagined booms
    of Schumacher-Levy as its pieces fell, one by one, in single file,
    into the pool of Jupiter; with years of nightmares of heavy weather
    after watching the twister and flying monkeys of "The Wizard of Oz;"
    with afternoons in the gardens that museums or galleries were, and the
    blossoming knowledge that there were others like me all over the world.]
My brain, my body, my life, and everyone's, and every animal's---every tree,
    every rock, every river, every ocean---every world, every star, every word, and
    every story, "unpack, like any text...."