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The Mind-Melting Grand Ka-Pow!
Mark Walsh

Too many days
too many years
I’ve wasted waiting
for the mind-melting grand
Ka-Pow!
the thunder jolt that awakens
forgotten consciousness.
Waiting—
to be bowled over by beauty,
struck dumb by sound,
enfolded in Enlightenment—
forty-five years of…wait…is this it?

In truth, the mind-melting grand
Ka-Pow!
was always available
sitting beside me,
exploding in my unhearing ears
by not exploding at all.
It reveals itself in delicate glimpses,
ekes out in small doses,
lies there in sunlight,
asking for nothing but a direct look.

The marvelous comes in minutes
moment to moment,
continually uncovered by
a single act
of paying attention.

(Ka-Pow.)

—
Mark Walsh is an English professor at Massasoit Community College in Brockton, MA, where he teaches literature and philosophy. Through Massasoit Television, he created Writers at Work, and is developing a new show, Out of the Marvelous, focusing on poets and poetry in Southeastern Massachusetts. Since the mid 1990s he had helped organize and host poetry readings in Plymouth and Brockton. Recently, Mark was the head judge of the selection team for the City of Brockton’s first-ever Youth Poet Laureate. He is a submission reader for The Lily Poetry Review, and his journalism has appeared in The South Shore News and The Marshfield Mariner. His most recent poetry publications include Beatnik Cowboy, The Lily Poetry Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review.

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