I.
Burnt offerings
produce a smoke,
which through torched crystals reveal
the apparition of a magus
in smiling light,
at the gates of this eternal symmetry,
enchanting the spirit,
unbounded,
toward rooms
within suns
within moons.
Consciousness decouples from the self
and is jettisoned,
giving a pageant wave
to the conceits of personality
as it rockets by.
The gates swing open
onto a sphere of perception
past this terrestrial plane.
Conjoining tether frays
and the projectiles of the mind
drop away like spent shells.
Earth’s firmament
spreads its fingers,
azure and slender,
into the arms of a waiting cosmos,
as a roller coaster’s rhythmic clanking
accompanies the ascent
toward
surrender.
Deep within the bowels of this dreamscape,
a trap door uncloses
onto a labyrinthian complex of magic.
Out flows a matrix of information,
a multiverse of conscious data.
Beyond space.
Beyond time.
Beyond A to B to Me.
II.
Spires tower toward
the kingdom inside,
as on a Moorish fortress,
containing arches within arches,
buttressed
by ever more arches
that frame views
of gardens,
which exist outside.
Images of schoolchildren play,
like a botany of youth
projected on the sun-soaked walls;
however,
they quickly morph into shadows,
exposing a haunting parade
of dark energy beings;
tenebrous,
bipedal apes,
they move like midnight,
harbingers of creation herself.
Insectile light-creatures
with bulbous eyes
likewise transit through
this theater of dream logic.
The contours of their crystalline skin
radiate a dull,
bioluminescent glow,
trafficking alien hieroglyphs
inward a cave
scrawled with the pagan poetry
of permanent love
and understanding.
III.
Fixed, at the center of it all,
serpents ravaging her frame
is Mother Being,
the architect,
a glistening golden lotus.
Numinous, she is them and they are her.
Eyeless, her countenance
is like a disc-shaped mirror
reflecting an echo of the magus’ cachinnation,
a faint cosmic giggle.
Mother gyrates,
thrusts and parries,
in an isometric balance between being —
creator,
destroyer,
professor,
madcap,
lover,
snake.
She hisses and clicks, free-flowing,
dancing her tentacled dance.
A deep, knowing grin stirs from every layer,
maternal and omnipotent.
Onomatopoeiae like:
ding,
buzz,
clink,
whir,
beep,
whoosh,
emit from the ineffable,
suggesting a vast supercomputer
housed in an underground network
of imaginary servers.
IV.
Agape at this vision of sentience —
this galactic brain
whose neurons pulse
inside an electric intellect —
my thoughts yet continue to probe,
determined not to be undone:
pushing,
pulling,
judging,
rote attempts to explain the unexplainable,
to school the soul in matters of the mind.
A snap of the fingers
and the grand illusion is restored;
that thin veil of maya,
having been revealed
to be an oh-so-delicate fabric,
now descends like an iron curtain.
Draped over our awareness,
its woven threads
no longer able
to extract the value
out of ore.
With this,
the formless returns to its sheath,
compressing unto
the double-stranded helix
we call life,
like a curved dagger
driven into flesh,
a wounded messenger for the other worlds,
Earth both its college and curriculum.
