poem of address

This is driving me mad, so I'll just post it.

The Sun is Our Brain                                                          

                                                                                                            for Kristofer

1.

Every morning I read out back, turning in my chair to follow the sun across the sky. Then it disappears over the roof. Two months of this and I’m not tired yet. 

My spirit animal is the heliotrope as I shift one inch at a time to the right … to the right … to the right.

Kris, they say the pineal gland is stimulated by bioelectrical input received through the eyes.

Phosphorescent nerve endings form electrical and chemical patterns so complex the hormones released make us feel something like happiness.

Aluminum legs scrap across the concrete pad.

But I’ve been calling it gratitude.

2.

Sunday afternoon in the yellow house on Fairmount Avenue in Wichita flashback:

I was drinking a thirty-pack and watching the Patriots. Tinfoil extended antenna bowing off the ceiling.

Pakistanis playing cricket in the street out front and you stopped by with a friend

for free beer but said you were interested in exploring “traditional masculine gender roles.”

3.

The sun is reversing its magnetic field every eleven years—flipping like a dolphin underwater.

North becomes south and south, north, as it follows its 250 million year orbit around a pulsing galaxy center.

The sun/ is mine.

Sound waves tunnel through it and form electrical patterns that mirror our own.

I believe my own consciousness is the byproduct of bioelectrical patterns received from the bioelectrical patterns of the sun.

You believe it’s is a brute ball of unconscious gas burning in a vacuum, Kris.

But you have to believe in something.

4.

I was six states away and halfway through my morning pivot when I heard the news.

A week-long heat wave in Wichita. 105 degrees at 6 p.m.

It all clicked into place so quickly some part of me thought I already knew.

More than anything, that’s what’s changed the most in the last eight months: I allow myself thoughts like maybe I already knew.

5.

Descartes believed the pineal gland was the seat of the soul and, when neglected, filled with sand.

My soul, like the sun, oscillates. It swings in the breeze like an open-mouthed mask hanging in a vineyard

the size of a grain of wheat.

Whatever. I miss you. And I wish I could have seen you one more time.

6.

Before you left I went in the other room and grabbed a City Lights book, Poetry and Mysticism.

Among other things it breaks down a symbolic system dreamt up by Yeats—so complex the author doubts Yeats himself believed in it. But it kept him working.

You looked at it casually and flipped it to your friend, “He’s the one who’s into poetry.”

7.

What would I have said?

That to make it long in this world you need to love something?

That to love something you need to see you and it as one?

No. I probably would have said, “Why should all the dumb fucks live and not you?”

(The sun, Kris. The sun.)

We’re supposed to let it lie to us.

We’re all here shaking with its energy.

We're all here burning up.