BIRTH PAINS

Another storm rolls in, its thunder
pounding in my head
till it splits wide open
at the fontanel. Soft at birth, this spot
is now as calcified as the rest of me,
hard as stone, it encases my brain and holds
in the pain till it builds to a crescendo.

My Self springs from my crown,
still in its infancy, blinking at the light from within
its cradle, the world too bright.
But soon this new form, ethereal,
translucent, will be solid and fleshy
as the old self dissolves away
in a moist puddle of blood and tissues.

If quantum physicists are correct,
all order is illusion. We are in a constant
state of flux, even our very electrons
shifting from one part of us to another,
from me to the cat
to the lamppost to the car passing by,
into the exhaust and up into the cosmos.

My electron now -- and there it goes
before I even get to say goodbye,
off into the stratosphere, the tail of a comet,
and I become the stuff of stars.
Even our bodies are illusion, more empty than space.
We are not our bodies -- cannot be
because our bodies do not exist.

We only imagine they exist, points within this shared
hallucination we call Earth, our home, itself
nothing more than a dream in the minds of men.
Just as the lightning rolls in a line across the hilltops,
dancing with electricity, so too do the cells
within me dance in mad ecstacy,
overexcited by too much caffeine.

Or just too much energy pouring in
through my every pore until I can't contain it.
I burst from my skull in a mad rush of pain, newborn.
And now the storm passes but the pain
remains as a reminder: all I need to do
is make my skull more permeable,
let the excess electrons bleed off into space.