Trigger Warning
1.
Who comprehends the mind, and when
will they help make sense of it?
There may be many of them, and they
may concern themselves with dispersed
networks of neurons in artificial colours
on screens fed data by quantum moments
pounding subjects in a tube with magnetic fields
to crack the bridges within the inner spaces of…
have you ever seen the picture of the Universe
that looks like neurons stretching and grabbing
each other? Is the Universe neurotic, psychotic,
chaotic; or robust, organic, seeking to be known?
2.
I dream in a writhing hive of diamondbacks
that makes me strong; but wears me down
with bleak nights and diamond hard days;
with blooms of metallic flowers in sweltering
summers; trying to bite into stone apples
wrapped in razor sharp lace; galloping
eccentric flame-nostriled horses looming
high above this juvenile whorl of impulses.
Backed into an airtight chamber, conformed
into the common shape of a noon time sundial,
I am squeezed outside of ordinary space into
a midnight lunar time piece of precise delirium.
3.
Ten years later I find myself dreaming
the mystery of existence in a wandering mind.
I know I’m not a curved word, or a cavernous
gourd-body. For sure I am my own god of dirt
and flat land, which soothes my aching axons.
My eyes perceive milkweed in cold still dawn.
Feelings flow as an oceanic cataract through
sky that shines like seashells in a convex lens.
It was the visual bottleneck that finally broke me.
Granite boulders of the black earth glow like teeth
along the shoreline, and I curl into myself, an
embryo in an egg of paranoid anxiety.
4.
I am a woman on her journey through hell
at summer’s end, walking tip toe beneath
a blue sky, despairing. Men think that kisses
will solve everything if I simply allow it to happen.
At the Point of Change I turn askance, and exit
this putrid dance of nothingness, for solitude.
I am a man drenched in a rain of iron shavings,
marking time with gray stains on statues of false
marble flesh. A shredded umbrella welters in the wind.
Shadows of hoary fuchsia hide dying flowers.
I am unprepared to give up my life in an exchange
of mad energy, mirrored in morbid fears.
5.
Along a waterfall I feel a sky-change inside:
A roar of mist and slow blood moon,
the black blasted bark of an old maple tree,
leafless in the stellar splendor of our galaxy’s ribbon.
Its dead limbs stretch like dendrites outward;
something stretches back, intertwining electric
communication in lightning intervals of life.
Yet, I don’t understand the ecstatic activity
of my peculiar dreams as they lash throughout
awareness, upon (or creating) a sea of dread.
This ropewalker slides through rainfall on a wire
with ledges far away, and windows out of reach.