Four In the Morning
The universe is crawling with unseen life:
angels and djinn and spiritual guides.
Like the excess in a stagnant pond,
this abscess of the Absolute
is obscenely corpulent
in every nook and cranny,
armpit and crotch
of the Great Mother
of dark energy and dark matter
we do not see anymore
than the germs in our guts see us,
because they are not germs
but neurons of a larger brain
in which an I is only an organ,
or rather an artificially imposed
membrane drawn arbitrarily
amid a mass of interactive
molecular gates with ions
coming and going as they please
without a thought of me.
Savages knew this once
and could feel it like an itch
beyond the reach of scratch.
Christian missionaries called it animism
and tried to beat it out of them,
bringing brassieres to contain breasts,
and bibles to contain minds,
but nights when I cannot sleep,
I wake at something the clock
marks as three or four,
with my mind teeming and itching
with alien cosmologies
of journeys through other galaxies
and I wake, knowing more than I am.
