Illuminating the Core Text

first published in Every Day Poets
Your mind an open canvas, I paint neurons with magic: broad strokes for coarse matters, swirling a palette of neurotransmitters that tickle and tease sparks down axons so-rarely traveled ... Hallucinations ghost themselves along the optic nerve, playing will-they won't-they left and right across your chiasm ... You shudder with an induced religious ecstasy, not unlike ... The stereotaxic easel holds. Sounds and smells deeper than imagination ring louder than truth, ceramic and lilac fireworks ... I count twelve distinct interpretations, violations of cause and effect, war-mongering lords paying lip service to sanity; choose meaning, crop reality to a context that unites the kingdom of delusion ... For a moment—one moment I let you taste from my perspective the scale of things: everything. And then I choose: a god basks in the flames of his island kingdom: dryad sacrifice. —and it is.

First published in Every Day Poets, 2012-05-07. Reprinted here by the author.