One More New Poem to Review

This one took a long time to work out in my head. It came about from a series of stories on NPR about the Godspot, a place in our temporal lobes where, if stimulated, can cause visions of god, angels, light and dark.

The God Spot
thanks to Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Touch me there. Reach your finger inside
my skull to feather
that spot on my temporal lobe.

In some kind of burning bush
hallucination, you might fire up
light and dark, even fire up angels,
or maybe, in my case,
demons running out of control.

Ancient mystics may have had the sacred
disease that brought visions, epileptic
brain seizures that bring God into sharp view.
If I had the sacred disease,
I might see angels
and not fear demons.

You just brush that spot
and, in an exclamation mark of emotion,
color bursts the sounds
and smells
and visions of God
or the Something Beyond our meager existence.

Maybe, in the beginning, we all had this god-spot.
Maybe most of us never
knew what was possible. And maybe

we are hard-wired to sense the Something Beyond,
the Supernatural, the
Eternal Now the mystics knew.

So if you can’t touch that spot in my skull,
touch me with your peyote in a mecca
of God, Muhammad, and Buddha.

Mystical experiences of meditation
shape sand dunes in my skull in two weeks,
and in two months you might see cities on a hill.
Touch me

somehow. I don’t care if God causes
the visions, or if the touch
causes God:

I want the burning bush
alive in my backyard,

the adagio in perfect D major,
popping off the top of my skull.