The vascular nerve explodes like a Christmas cactus, a flourish of oxygen-red
synapses,
     and the 250lb trucker with his head between his knees at the I-80 rest-stop
     cures his hyperventilating by breathing into a paper bag.
Sullied with a Burger King label, the bag becomes a crumpled new lung, still faint
     with the smell of fries and I’m sure he thought of Mahakala the Great Black
One,
     third eye ringed red and glowing, or perhaps only, I will surely die --
Here, unable to breathe at the side of the highway like some sort of animal.

Panic, you see, can be easy, it's self-awareness that takes time. I am thinking of a
buddhist
     adept, who, confronted with gang-rape
     enlightened her perpetrators one by one while they still jerked rigid inside her.

There are experiences after which it doesn’t matter who or what
     you were like before. Like this trucker, for example, his head now in his hands
At the edge of a toilet in the generic rest stop, wondering why he has never thought
     about breath, or what happens there, what happened
To the back of his head suddenly effluvial and melting into the headrest somewhere
     outside of Gary, Indiana,
     his lungs like spider sacs, the cillia of thistle, a milkweed's dried boat.