Inside my skull
several solitary islands drift;
mine, too, shelters
a handful of ecosystems
that can germinate nowhere else.
Tonight I would like to speak
of a chicken
dwelling on the Third Myelin-Axon Archipelago.
—
It does not crow;
it sparks.
Plumage braided from pale-gold Schwann threads
flickers when wind unrolls a memory,
each quill a phosphene
leaping node to node across salt water.
It eats no grain.
Instead it pecks the silt of cognition—
half-hatched metaphors,
footnotes never summoned to the lectern,
those crumbs that settle
where deliberate thought rarely wades.
On its island the Rule of Isles holds sway:
large ambitions dwindle to lap-sized fossils,
while small anxieties bloom into cassowaries
tall enough to eclipse the moon.
Resources are few, predators absent;
shape follows the pressure of shortage or peace.
From a single basal instinct
radiates a skein of beaks:
one suited to crack the lignin of logic,
one to pull irony from bark,
one—thin as a needle—to siphon solace
from the blood-warm seabirds of emotion.
Adaptive, yes, yet every specialisation
is a door welded to its own frame.
A caution rises with the tides:
imported chickens—those coop-bred dogmas—
strut ashore from passing freighters of opinion.
They scatter the incandescent feathers,
trample seedlings of synaptic moss,
inject certainty like venom into the soil.
The island quakes;
a thought once lithe becomes a stiffened relic.
Beyond the reef a ghost isle hums,
a cartographic limb already severed
yet still aching in the cortical map.
When night currents shift,
its phantom surf drags nostalgia inland,
and even the chicken freezes—
old defence rehearsed against extinct raptors—
while pain whistles through a place
that can no longer be reached by boat.
Dawn slips in on synaesthetic weather.
Rain tastes of brass syllables;
wind arrives blue against the teeth.
The chicken’s silent flare
guides a flotilla of hummingbirds
whose wings riff in spectral chords,
cross-pollinating dormant coves of idea.
Somewhere a giant tortoise of habit
etches a new path between two cliffs,
raising stone like long-term potentiation
so the next signal may jump
without drowning.
And I, observer bound to a mainland spine,
note in the margin:
isolation begets novelty,
yet novelty inherits its own frailty.
I set down my pen,
unsure whether the glow receding inland
belongs to the bird
or to the axon rhythm itself—
a pulse, a gap, a leap,
then darkness that is also passage.