The Wake

Before I forget how it felt let me tell you:
the lightning rod entered the end of my nostril
and moved up my sinus like vine branches teething.
It stayed in my brain for a season, destroying
every room like a road-kill hotel flashing vacancy.
Then it fell under my thoughts like a wall cloud
and some kind of siren-throats howled in unison,
WOAAAO WOAA they knew it was building,
WOAAAO WOAA they howled in unison.
Under my earlobes a worm started growing;
it gnawed at my cortex like angel hairs burning.
An ash settled onto my skull-base and tempered;
it blistered a nerve that kept twitching my fingers.
At once a huge mirror ball shattered its pieces
and glitter fell down through my head like invention.
Then slowly, as if to prolong indecision,
the lightning rod started to spin like an auger.
It drove down my spinal cord bleeding electrically,
postholeing nerve-ended chunks of my vertebrae.
Outward it went spilling outward like gasoline;
fire ants ran through my veins eating ecstasy.
Outward and outward until I was loaded
and each of my synapses frayed at the nucleus.
BLOOM! I opened up violence. BLOOM!
I felt every atom explode into silence.
I flew, and with the release I was flittering,
weightlessly riding a supercell highway.
The universe felt like a penlight inside me
and everything else was an emptyless ether.
I clung to my penlight and tried to remember
the thing that you told me the last time this happened.