In Case it Comes Up: Kundalini is Covered by Health Insurance

I told the nurse I swallowed a snake. He charted: religious mania. But I felt her— three and a half turns sleeping just south of the back of my clavicle. I called her Vera then, full breath pried me open. Fire-rising, slithering: it was gospel sliding down my vertebrae— a ladder Jacob had forgotten— yea and behold though we came back for it. I couldn’t stop laughing. Or crying. Or saying I saw light in the colorless rooms outside understanding. When I explained, again, how god comes in my root, propels herself through my expanded throat chakra, they were furious— branded me inpatient, wrapped my wrists, ordered more Thorazine. They don’t let me sit cross-legged, say my mantra disturbs the others. Just between you and me this energy wall crumbling, this crux of second comings, this fifth horseman— is a woman re-forming initiation: an apocalypse finally worth the animal salt-sweat hump it took to get it going.