poppies

...a student gave me a tincture of poppies, so I can roll over and drop it under my tongue in the middle of the night when my searing headache, now - where are we - week 11? 12? - has me staring into darkness trying to think the tendons in my neck into pliability and trying to imagine just where the pain is now and what it might look like in there - some kind of electric blue hot molly-bolt popped open in my medulla, pink spinning glass rod between my temples.

well the poppies...(i hear the Wicked Witch of the West: "Poppies, Paawpies!"). one drop under my tongue and my dreams go wild, turn into the bean stock from Jack and the Bean stock, take on a scale even that in my complex dreaming is magnified to a grandiose and different out-sizing and I am gone.

No time now to write of the gallactic snowstorm, and perfect body sledding fast on a(nother tilting) world: the geography complete, satellite-mappable in its scope and detail.
I have to get ready for class.

I do hope I'm not getting hooked on opiates. (my student assures me the tincture is not that)
Still, when I finally get an image of my stupid head in three weeks, I wouldn't be surprised to find it stuffed to bursting with golden poppies and little teenytiny palm-sized worlds and vast, magnificent alpine planets in which it snows falling stars and i play for lifetimes like the happiest child.