Cortex Poems | Examples

Monster

There is a monster in my bed and I let him in. I supplied the pillow to rest. His quiet wickedness I don't address.  As he fondles my body while I lay still undressed.   I don’t reciprocate his love or affection and he won’t allow me to stop it or reject it. That must be his thrill. Just begging for me to pet it. Like a dog. I like dogs. They don’t force me to love them. They just are. He has a darkness beneath the face,  beyond the freckles and scars.  He stays inside until he thinks you bought the bit that he is a chivalrous guy,  but he has secrets to hide. As sweet and willing as he seems he is holding two sharp blades to your carotid artery. In plain sight but you choose not to see.  You let the darkness in because a part of you believes you too are a dark fruit fallen from the forbidden tree.  Another lying message you allowed your brain to receive. You are more than an object of affection, you are deserving.   Sometimes we have to burn it all down to start anew. A cleansing of the medial prefrontal cortex erasing desires previously initiated for a few as I currently have a monster in my bed and I am the one who invited him in.

Breathless in Silent Collapse

Breathless,
words like cordyceps adhere to my throat,
Choking me as the unspoken wrap around, seizing vocal cords.
Sticking fingers down, I claw to clear closing airways,
Yet the more I struggle, the more entwined they become.

Disconsolate spores have taken root within heaving lungs,
Spreading to each chamber of the heart, systematically.
Transported through streams of hemoglobin,
Swiftly infecting Broca's area before moving to the primary motor cortex—
As all speech ceases to be.

Waves in the Brain

Waves in my brain
to your cliche songs they entrain
Background music in the store
It takes me over to my core

Others keep looking for merchandise
Or converse with each other to break the ice
But I sing along with nothing to prove
Just taken over by a nonlinear groove.

(chorus)
Waves in my brain like a tidal refrain,
When you can't think, the vacuum's the pain
I sing other people's words, can't think alone
cobwebs grow on a stalling stone

My cortex resonates to the rhythmic beat
I start dancing in the aisles, pounding my feet
It's like I'm under a spell by a witch
As my brainstem resonates to a higher pitch

The people with the white coats come for me
My shrink is puzzled, he just can't see
When your brain is one big empty hall
Music rules it, better than nothing at all.

They were right, I'm just an empty suit
So don't play that piano, guitar or flute
Thinking is hard, But I'm going to be brave
I'll find a way to make my own wave.

Insignificant Monster No More

Drained of opaque innocence
Perfected by your toxicity,
I was laid bare beneath the narcissistic sun,
Searing deep within dehydrated pupils,
Stripping my soul of all humanity,
until your sinister tongue was all I could hear.

Your empty promises clothed these bones;
running was no longer an option,
as hiding became nearly impossible within your shadows.

Voices, eating through my cerebral cortex,
tainted even the demons that resided within my mind.

Minuscule reminders of my life before became particles of dust,
floating through suffocating air,
choking the little oxygen you let me breathe,
until the poison became too much to take.

Falling to my knees, vomiting your vile lies,
my life flashed like motion pictures before my eyes.

A choice was given:
either purge—rip the cursed, stinging nettle from my veins,
or die under your cruelty.

I will not rot for an insignificant monster;
a cleansing is long overdue.

Musings of a Diehard Behaviorist

      What’s on the old mind tonight
       the good old frontal cortex
         the ole gray matter
           ~ not that it does…

My Mother Was Catatonic

My mother was catatonic, symphonic chronic is what I smoke.
Livinin it bougie, choosin floosies no uzis and then I choke.
You can be me, insane cerebral cortex is
just what I feel.
Living pervy swerving Lexus and hexes to get the deal!
I'm the homosexual, heterosexual, suicidal bloke.
I was adopted by white family and to them I'm just a joke.
They are white supremacist hollow and they drink a racist coke.
And they bought themselves a black kid, broke me down and built a moat.
I'm the illest of the illest, you the illest with a pill.
Donate plasma with no athesma, drain so much I start to spill!
Got the game on lock with fakers who found out that words can kill.
Better bump this  on speakers like I invented free will!
Spendin money by the twenties gettin hundies by the bill..
And I'll never stand for the flag so you coonies can in chill!
If my words had a flavor I'm sure I'd be spicy dill.
Bringing back the old school freshness like my name is Uncle Phil!

- Thinking Out Loud -

                                         prefrontal cortex
                             "thinking brain" - the unconscious 
                                      can become conscious

Election Musings

Between my thicker and thicker lobes
Lies a much less thick wick
Which reflects a dimmer and dimmer glimmer of what was once brimming with more than a shimmer of hope and optimism
Two parties bickering and flickering
While a third party that many think green has a luminous base as it soaks in combusted blue and red particles
Yet its growing flame is unable to sustain as what it has absorbed is erratic and wanes and leads to a slimmer and slimmer glimmer smoldering to a simmer and ultimately leads to a blue or even worse red flame that my cerebral struggles to cortex.

A Poet's Eyes

Seeing — Unseeing
the words drift away
far into the current
of what’s left to say

Passing my cortex
and into the void
where blind recognition
awaits to destroy

Familiar or foreign
once stopped in their tracks
new meaning escapes
with no looking back

The Poet’s eyes squinting
as light filters out
transcendence recaptured
ascendance remounts 

Through slivering darkness
a vision appears
and mocking the order
old images clear

Those words once discarded
reform juxtaposed
through eyes resurrected
— released from the flow

(Septa R5: July, 2024)

The Maestro And His Deaf Child

Quote: Bring forth the music dear lover of soul, she's waiting for a drop   

A Conducter's baton fills the air with caresses of passion and zest 
as a black patent leather shoe taps gently on a varathane wood plank
it sends a sensory cortex vibration to a deaf infant child, pure elation.  

With a suave wave of his delicate hand the conductor brings the music  
to a regal Orchestra who is finely attuned to a child's ears like fine sand.  
Waltzelettos to the heart, the child doesn't hear not does she cry 
when a salt and pepper haired man raises his tuxedo sleeves in the air,  
the heart pumps blood and resurrects her once more.  
 
Staccato notes each detached and separated from the other, 
the newborn listens, lost in a paradise of movement and sound.  

Infinite notes from a seasoned Maestro,
head is sewn to the carpet next to a transistor radio,  
the toddler remembers louder days 

He was a German Maestro/composer and his name was Carlos Kleiber, 
today he sleeps in a quiet memorial room,  in beautiful Slovania.

Eben Alexander

near death experiences 
compel us to relook
at our beliefs

take the case
of Eben Alexander
hard nosed neuro surgeon

with his cortex fully severed
he yet returned healed 
speaking of angels

love alone is real
is the message echoed
hello! is humanity listening

Stark Change

I stared into the mirror, wincing at my own reflection,
through eyes fogged by cataract. 
Saw a black tint spreading around my eyes
and face like a wrinkled piece of linen

Where is the bubbly girl of seventeen? 
I asked myself.
How flamboyant and flaunting I was,
now enveloped in silence.
Do anyone remember my younger version- 
the little birdie that tweeted endless? 

Beneath the shell of this withering cortex,
I still have a heart young as ever,
not yet shriveled, but succulent
full of love and warmth;
a sleeping guitar, capable of music,
if trained hands move over my taut strings.

So please don't take me as a wretched hag, 
and push me into a state of silent non-being
or throw me like the chip of a broken mirror, 
making me feel so inconsequential!

Shagalicious

The slithered shadows trailed my shag rug, in the foothills of the upright weave of flaccid threads. 

Seemingly chaotic, yet made out of pure design and memory: From the hands of its maker, rolled into the flatness beneath its buyer’s feet. Asking “why” looks for the in-between, vast as forever. The math: A hard one and social, but still a math. More of a psychonomic-politecology.

Our bodies are just the same—moving pieces that pretend to be in a vacuum. We aren’t in one, but surely under it every so often.

Pieces who poise in passing places and people; pretending preponderance, betraying imposed predilections, to the preferable exposed. 

Psychobiophysic microcosms invoke the such of a macrosomatic glob that is the everything, at least on this atomic chunk. 

And so forth,
And so forth.

The gibberish in the rug is a cortex, and so are we.

Confidence Is a Choice

Confidence is a choice,
Preponderance of undue ignorance,
Tethered in tandem to wheels of spiny leathery,
Bumpy hairs click back at a finger’s flick.

Rotations earned from itself, but more,
Tread marks lead the way,
Devouring grounds of consummate cortex,
Until tracings are unchallenged by craft. 

Back and forth, a sawmill slices,
Though it’s only imagined.
Inside mind and spine seen when,
The body refuses to move again.

Which corridor of counting oneself by the shelf,
Bound leather to me be shown?
Pores of proportions, round algebra,
Confines Gaussian blurs to the grown. 

I choose that which nature gifts, the will to change the mind,
Plastic melts and pressure sticks to those whose self is kind.

Hope

The man wondered, "What is hope?"
Metacognition defined, it's nothing but a dope.
The heart objected to the proposition.
And told it's an ambiguous anticipation.
The prefrontal cortex made the reasoning disentwine.
And equated hope with the level of dopamine.
The enterochromaffin cells rejected the cortical rationality.
And signified serotonin's vitality.
Posterior pituitary smiled sarcastically.
And illustrated oxytocin's role affectionately.
The man woke up out of this exasperation.
Though dream, but intrigued by the imagination.
He asked," Is hope just a chemical state?"
Consciousness whispered it's not that straight.

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