“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.”