Monday, March 31, 2014

Sight (excerpt from "Dendrite")

The human eyeballs are slung within the orbital cavities of the
skull and those well-slung eyeballs see. See that there are 
twenty-two transparent jelly-fish inside your vitreous body. 
Crystalline. Like the crystal you hang around your neck for 
strength every time we collide. The ones in my window that 
cast prisms on my pillow. Lay your little head down to rest, 
hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a 
mockingbird, And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s 
gonna buy you a diamond ring. And a looking glass. And a billy
goat. And a cart and bull. And a dog named Rover. And a bunch 
of other pointless shit that you can’t use because you’re a baby 
and Mama thinks she can buy your love. 






Nearly all newborn babies have the blue blue ocean eye - as the 
pigment of the iris delivery is backed up because the brown-
paper package got lost in the mail and the iris stork had a 
broken left wing, sling. Later, in due time, after birth,
pigmentation will turn brown, hazel, green. And all the baby  
blue eyes will sink to the bottom of the ocean. Fish food.








Sensory nerves provide the link between tooth and nail. The 
nail in the fourth step of the stair’s floorboard, that eavesdrops 
on your whispers and whispers mocking whispers: “glucose coat 
my blood vessels, chlorophyl my lashes” But you always run up stairs.
Childhood fear chasing you up, up. If you don’t go fast enough 
it will catch you, grip you. Instead, run up and down my central 
nervous system twenty times, and don’t you stop until you reach 
my cerebral cortex! Place your lightning-bugged mason jar here. 
X marks the spot where we repel, where the oil paint meets the 
turpentine. Go ahead, thin me. Prune. Prune those neuron 
cells; enhanced efficiency. That magic forest of incredible
beauty; luxuriant growth. Plasticity or deforestation?





One cortical neuron will respond to that stimulation. I’ll even 
spill my guts, show you the precise topography of the receptor 
surface, all the exact somatic sense pathways that resemble a 
map of my body’s cortex. Be careful, make haste, there’s a 
considerable area of cutaneous surface. Traverse to treasure 
chest.