“It Resides At the Base of the Spine (a 7 on the Richter Scale)”

I focused at a single point with total expansion,
Imagined a sphere of light
And a spiraling star structure
Snaking up my ascending vertebrae.
Prickling needlepoint ticklings tingled,
In my right hand and the tip of my spine,
Right where it meets the brain stem,
And that was the start of things—becoming quite different.

The Thinker in me said, “Fear is only a brain fart—bring it on!”
The Thinker let the Feeler
Dive up fire up blast off
Like a rocketing butterfly,
And I let go of the remote control.
It burst open against the Eastern tile.
I opened up like the broken channel changer,
Electronic internals splayed about,
And suddenly the TV monitor played all channels at once.
One hand burrowed in the cookie jar,
Digging up sweets and delights,
The other bored down my toilet,
Roto-rooting clogged pipes,
Freeing up drains,
Transforming my whole organic structure,
My whole system of wiring.
It was better than any drug I'd taken ever.

And still, there will always be continents
In the deepest, darkest, as yet unexplored depths of the ocean,
Waiting to be pieced together into Pangaea.
It’s like this: I was only operating at, say,
A 7 on the Richter scale,
Which is exponential,
Meaning
That there’s a multitude of multitudes
Yet to be tapped and tuned into—
I have yet to write on “The Big One.”

"Like John Said..."

I’ve got a full-time cancer job
And stress hormones in my brainstem.
I’ve got frozen tundra desert feet;
They slip out from under me in any stance I try.
Like John said, “A workin’ class hero is sumthin to be.”
I sense stimuli through icy foggy lenses.
My love is filtered through my liver.
I’m a slumbering, lumbering lungfish:
I never exhale fully, and I poise myself mid-breath half the time.
Like John said, “A workin’ class hero is sumthin to be.”
I’m dragging nine bowling balls behind me,
Chained to every extension from my trunk.
I’ve got a soldering iron, I could conceivably melt them off,
But the pain and struggle of untangling my mental manacles is too much...
I wouldn’t know how to do without these fetters and tethers...
And besides,
It’s taken my whole life
To be this good
At what I do.

"Pocket Lint Umbrellas"

It seems like every time I break a finger,
I have to improvise a splint
Out of medical tape and incense sticks
Because I lack more appropriate materials.
It seems like every time I drive
It’s raining like the sky’s ripped asunder
And it's falling down in huge chunks of condensed cloud.
The chunks back up drainages
And the roads are all chunked up
And my screen is chunked up because my wipers are defunct.
So I pull over and walk miles through the rain without an umbrella.
It’s always the same.

I get used to it.
The way we all get used to it.
The way we get used to carcinogens and radiation from TV.
It’s like when I play that card game Hearts on the computer.
I usually always lose, which figures, but isn’t the point.
The point is that every time the game’s over the computer flashes, “Deal again?”

It flashes, over and over.
If I played it a million times,
Would I be any better at comprehending the strategy?
Why do I dwell on it?
Since my eyes are glued to my particular computer screen,
And not going anywhere for a lifetime, shouldn’t I give it another shot?

Because it seems like everything is like the weather.
And it seems like the only thing I can do about it,
Is make an umbrella from my pocket lint.