Trigger Warning
I relax, limbs spread across the bed.
Under a comforter I roast on a spit
of my own heat. My head spins,
I ask no questions in diffuse light
from a tiny screen three feet away.
As I slip among the teal phosphenes
I paint a portrait of a spectrum of ghosts
existing between gaps of pig iron lattice.
They move in cinematographic jerks
of luminous sun dance turning
wet Spring into hot Summer.
I slip off the cliff of consciousness.
Smoking slag behind the irises
blooms a heavenly kind of stratum of
blue/black pillars, fractured and melted together.
Empty columns of some other heaven
(a bookish, leaden heaven,
author of dusty attic pedantry)
sprout like secondary scoria,
(ill scented Tree of Heaven), and
constrict my will to wander in self creation.
So I turn, and all at once I’m here
with a thousand eyes all angled
acute, obtuse; filling my view
with thirty millennia of substance.
I say little, ponder the wide nets of open sight
in a spectrum where every wavelength
is foreground, and my mind splits open
seeking shadows to set margins on unstrung objects.
Ecstatic sounds of primal flute;
amorphous forms of aurochs, wisent shadow,
horse mane; familiar phosphenes
of lightning bolt, starburst, flaming corolla
fire my sleeping imagination
with coronagraph images;
shamanic stick-men dance from abyssal cracks in camera obscura;
bioluminescent birds swerve on night time draughts of air;
oceans of electromagnetic grass
fan out in fluvial light through a concave lens.