I thought, so this is what happens
to the ones they can’t follow the
wires of, to the ones who’ll dumfound
the doctors for centuries, growing
up inside a haunted house of other’s
flashing questions meant to agitate
the brain, the way certain fish are
agitated by a fluorescent lure,

when they glued red and blue wires
to my scalp and body, and then
put headphones on my childhood,
before removing themselves to an
observation room, where they
asked me to listen to blips, report
my feelings under a strobe light, and
raise, either my left or right hand to
signify what year I heard them in,

studying me, not unlike the way
Professor Venkman in the movie
Ghostbusters studied his test subjects
for clairvoyant capacity, when he
asked them to imagine the card he
was holding.

A part of me knew then they’d
want to someday read and study
my mind from the distance of an
undiscoverable life, that others who
claimed my spiritual poetry was
paradoxically mundane and elegant,
would prefer to observe the speaker
in my poems from a safe and
comforting distance, as if it were
on the other side of a shatterproof
two-way mirror they could take
their time looking through without
reflecting on how it’s always been
themselves they’ve been interrogating.   

For years, I picked glue out of my
head on the ride home from the
hospital, where my poetry, even
before I started writing it, knocked
on my mind’s door before coming
through it with yet another shiny
and mildly threatening looking
elaboration in its hand to tell me
I’ve been doing great, but there’s
just one more thing it has to try
on me first, before I can go home.

Occasionally, the ride into the
unknown isn’t one we’d like to
come home to, and we’ll need
other brave and observant souls to
do it for us, in secret, until the day
comes we can follow the signs
that’ll help us understand how we
arrived before we got there.