Four In the Morning

The universe is crawling with unseen life:

angels and djinn and spiritual guides.

Like the excess in a stagnant pond,

this abscess of the Absolute

is obscenely corpulent

in every nook and cranny,

armpit and crotch

of the Great Mother

of dark energy and dark matter

we do not see anymore

than the germs in our guts see us,

because they are not germs

but neurons of a larger brain

in which an I is only an organ,

or rather an artificially imposed

membrane drawn arbitrarily

amid a mass of interactive

molecular gates with ions

coming and going as they please

without a thought of me.

Savages knew this once

and could feel it like an itch

beyond the reach of scratch.

Christian missionaries called it animism

and tried to beat it out of them,

bringing brassieres to contain breasts,

and bibles to contain minds,

but nights when I cannot sleep,

I wake at something the clock

marks as three or four,

with my mind teeming and itching

with alien cosmologies

of journeys through other galaxies

and I wake, knowing more than I am.