The Chakras

I.

Wheels within wheels, endlessly turning,
Galaxies,flowers,planets,trees and human beings,
And the seven vortices of the subtle body,
Receiving,assimilating,transmitting,
Leading you to the heart of the spiral maze…
Earth, water, fire, air, sound, light and thought!
The god is nothing without his goddess;
The seed is nothing without the womb;
He descends to embrace her, and she ascends,
To eternal love-making, creating the cosmos,
Flesh and spirit, out of their spirit and flesh.
The coiled serpent at the base of the Tree
Awakes,unfolds,and climbs, winding round
The caduceus, the spine of Universal Man,
Reaching for the crown, the consummation,
Opening the seven gateways as she rises,
Seven initiations, seven stations to bliss.
Out of the perineum, the coccygeal plexus,
Out of the adrenal glands, the red energy
Rises, under Saturn’s glare, with the horns
Of the bull, the light of bloodstone and ruby,
Leaden and square, rooted in the earth,
Pushing upwards against the force of gravity;
The moon glows in the coral womb,
Six-petalled lotus, floating on water,
Spiral desire and pleasure bathing the eggs
In the ovaries, the sperm in the testicles,
Glinting like tin, smelling of orris root,
In the sacrum’s chalice, where opposites attract;
The solar plexus flames with yellow plasma,
All will and power, laughter and anger,
Burning sandalwood and saffron at the altar
Of the pancreas, under ram-horned Mars,
As blacksmiths wrestle iron on the anvil,
In a topaz prism, a prison of amber;
Venus unsheathes its emerald sword
In the heart, and winds rush through the lungs,
Aromas of lavender,jasmine,meadowsweet,
Like doves in flight, and antelopes leaping,
As kissing lips conjoin in equilibrium,
And the thymus opens up its copper mine;
Blue sound vibrates in the throat, synthesising
Ideas into symbols, quicksilver in the mirror,
As Mercury waves its wand in the ether,
And frankincense burns in the thyroid gland,
Speech-seeds blooming turquoise, aquamarine,
Sensitive as the elephant’s inner ear;
The pineal gland ignites with silver light,
Lapis lazuli forms a jewel in the brow,
To perceive, to command, drawing the favour
Of Neptune and Jupiter, and the scanning owl
Takes flight, through indigo, light as the scent
Of mugwort,spreading its wings with joy;
Violet to white, light fountains from the crown
Of the head, Uranus is in the ascendant,
In the pituitary gland, in the cerebral cortex,
Adamantine bliss, the gold of El Dorado,
After the mountains and deserts crossed,
The incense of the invisible lotus.

II

Spiral galaxies, thousands of light years across,
Trillions of atoms whirling in a grain of sand,
Spinning firewheels of energy
In flowers,trees,planets,people….
Receive, assimilate, transmit:
I am the vehicle of eternity,
The gorgon-headed starfish of light.

Seven colours in the rainbow,
Seven notes in the Western scale,
Seven days of the week,
And they say that life goes in cycles of seven years…
When the holy serpent comes
I must answer his questions and obey him-
No running, no hiding,
Just the medicine in his fangs.

Let kundalini rise,
With visions,insights,voices,
Weightlessness and bliss.

What is this invincible force
Thashing through me,
Smashing the barriers
And breaking through to the sky?
Exultation and dread
Quake my fibres,
Through monstrous eyes
I view the world anew.

III.Muladhara

Out of the red earth,
Out of the deep root,
I climb.
The sciatic nerve sings
Down the legs
As they touch the earth,
All gravity and motion.
Out of the perineum,
Out of the coccygeal ganglion,
The force of a thousand suns sprouts and grows.
Let me be my royal body,
Its pain and pleasure and shape,
Its heavenly stuff,trillions of pulsing cells,
The world’s lodestone,
Full of wisdom and healing.
I am the sun’s lightning rod,
Resonating with the ionosphere.

IV.Svadhisthana

Connect and grow.
Now I am down in the water,
A creature of the abyss.
The vortex of the sacral plexus
Churns with roaring force.
Since the world began,
What of any worth has been achieved without passion?
Blood, piss, semen, tears,
Liquid oozes out of me,
Trawled by the moon.
The roots are deep
And the fruit is sweet:
All is pleasure and nurture.
Soothe the limbic system,
Pleasure the hypothalamus:
Heart,blood and breath
Ease and enjoy themselves.
Expand and surrender,
Let impulses flow fearless and free,
Tune the senses to the heavens.
A hundred drops of semen
Distil a single drop of wisdom.
Let the blue fire of the pineal gland
Catabolize melatonin
Into 10 methoxyharmalan-
Visions and revelations…
Touching,reaching out to each other,
We are smiling into each other,
Saying, “We are here.”
Love: this word so easy to pronounce,
So difficult to capture-
The foundation,
The precious essence…
What longing and dread
The strange beast inspires!
Without this binding force
How would anything hold together
Long enough to evolve?
After all, we are only seeing
The connections that existed all along.
All these endless patterns!-
Dynamic equilibrium.

V.

Thirteen billion interconnected nerve cells of the brain,
One hundred million sensory receptors within the body,
Ten trillion synapses in the nervous system…

As when you scatter sand on a steel plate
And rub a violin bow along the edge,
The vibration makes the grains
Dance into a mandala,
So your touch re-orders me…

Sound waves projected into water
Conjure patterns like the forms of nature:
Spiral galaxies,
Cellular division in an embryo,
The iris of the human eye.

The pineal gland,
Magical cone in the head-core,
Translates variations of light
Into hormonal language.

As when the singers of a choir
Hold their last note until their voices resonate,
Shaking the auditorium to the core
With that pure electric ring
That echoes ever after in the heart,
So our lives lock into each other,
Each the other’s key.