Brain Pirates

Mark Silcox

From other, hungrier possible worlds

come adventurous nanites

to harvest the plentitude of your morning dreams.

Invisible, devious correctors

stream down your neural corridors

plundering the outflow of your inner world

while you shift and writhe in a tangle of sheets –

extracting visions, faces, memories,

purposeful but selective,

invoking standards only known

to their hidden, desperate builders.

They slip demurely past stock images of fear, arousal,

but seize the sudden memory of a hornet’s wing,

the sweet laughter you heard at midnight through thin walls,

the time-shrouded flickers of your dead grandmother’s eyes,

exporting these treasures back to their starveling realms.

Returning to their homeland like dew on ruptured leaves,

they joyously unload their golden harvest,

and ruined mental theaters become bathed

in borrowed limelight, fresh performances.

When you stir awake, gum-eyed, dry-mouthed

Your private vistas, too, shiver with prophecies.

Scars, like tiny branches, etch your visual cortex

with entangled echoes of these visitations:

rough landscapes, double suns, weird foliage, inhuman faces

glowing with a hunger more intimate than love.