The Very Bowels of Creation

It's amazing what the weird mix of red wine and slightly out of date ice cream can create. i was awoken from a dream by the sound of a voice. i awoke suddenly, i heard the voice so clearly. there was someone else in the dream with me, someone i know. was the voice supposed to belong to this person? does it matter? only me there, in reality.

how digestion affects the extent and intensity to which we dream has interested me for a while, because, as happened in the last hour or so, sometimes my own dreams are so vivid and i know it's because there is rumbling going on below. i was fascinated to learn from the genius stephen fry on the show called QI, that we have a "second brain" in our gut. further research revealed its slightly more opaque anatomical name: the enteric nervous system. it can function independently of the main brain (you know, the one inbetween the ears - yeah, cheers) and this, apart from being fascinating, holds poetic humour and mystique for me; funny to think of all the emotion that gets connoted with guts, both in cliched phrasing e.g. i think he's got the guts to go for it etc, as well as the fact that medically, so many of the symptoms of emotional angst are traced to the gut region.

neurology is endlessly interesting to me and again there is poetry in the medical terminology. we really have a sympathetic nervous system, for example. i find much poetry in scientific register, to my delight. much of the lexicon of the following poem is from my beloved wikipedia, which fans out as does the malapropping mental lexicon. i could get lost for days, drifting on a sea of wiki. there is copy here from text on gear systems, speech generating technology, even a little seismology i think - i was obsessed with geography and my ward lock's pictorial atlas as a child and distinctly remember the cut-in-half world, the inner and outer core, the earth's crust. a certain tv character i like uttered a phrase i like: "spinning iron amorphous core of the earth". i am probably mis quoting but hey, poetic license and all that. he was being dramatic (no, really?) but his phrase seems to have seeped into my conscience, like the thingies through the intestinal cheesecloth in my poem. i now think "spinning iron amorphous core of the earth" is a real thing, which i don't think it is.

from all my ferreting around on wiki, i would most highly recommend the entry on the steam digester, also known as papin's digester - amusing and very interesting, as, i think, is the way i happened across it. i was visualising pressure cookers, my mother would often use one, which somehow connected to what i reckon must go on down there in the gut. so that led me to papin and his bone crushing exploding steam digester. cool.

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a shockingly vivid dream

the various meaning of wake up
conscience clear as a bell
its voice as green as the grass
the mind-eye clockworks, playbacks
all that has been ingested
scooped, funnelled, spirited
by the soft intestinal muscle
relayed by the second brain
all unison, all a well-oiled machine,
all pith and obliviously self-aware,
bent on task, click-click go the pistons
in slots, doing the dirty work of
playback, rinse-through, spin cycle:
each cog sympathetic, each cog a
reflector of the past, the glow
lessening, increasing, fading,
soul to conscience to nerve ending
sleepers, railway junctures, spotters
sympathetic nervous system
algorhythmic homing pigeon
narrow-gauge gear-mesh idler
raw torque, loose wheels, oiled cogs
loose talk spouts forth
the voice seems to be the driver
transmitting rotational motion
mirroring what is executed in real time,
physical display the puppet, a virtual device,
the sealed vessel, organs in dermis
fat extraction, internal reaction, rendering;
the miners are busy at work,
casting bone to brittle, releasing steam
allowing liquid to be hotter, amorphous,
spinning, disordered molecules, melt,
to be found in the bowels, the core,
drawing in of all, the funnel; irrestible.

the virtualness of the device may interrupt,
thus synthethised speech, during pressing
and during draining, may suffer leakage,
may eddy and stray, filtering through membrane
through cheesecloth and so does generated voice
come through loud and clear and white and pure
and the voice is the conscience and the voice is
heard and the chords, vocal, empathetic, resound
in such arresting union that oneness is and
genera-tor is indistinguishable from genera-ted
and the lid is lifted, buffeted up, skylighted;
hatch is unbatoned, revealing all that activity.