My Life in Prepositions

Thanks to prepositions I can be on drugs, get into music, sway under the influence and rock around the clock.

I can jump up and down, crawl into a sleeping bag, sleep under the stars, wander into dreams, and wake up feeling down.

I can drink from a bottle, sit at a computer, work on a novel, go out of my head and hover over a page like a helicopter with hair. 

I can stand by, step down, step up, walk around, understand, underbid, undergo, undercut, underdress and understate.

I can go underground overdrawn in overdrive overflowing with overgrowth.

I can get over a cold, fall into love, grow to maturity, sink into despair, fly off the hammer, get back at a gnat, pull on a pullover, pass through a door, hose down a house, walk across the street, have lunch at a diner, eat with a fork, talk to a cook, come home and listen to Aftermath.

I can lean against a wall among thoughts and reflections or get in between some words and alter the course of a sentence or stand firmly behind an opinion or walk along a high wire balancing a cat a monkey and a chicken or feel throughout my body the movement of blood in circulation or aside from that write letters to Mr. Bean or by means of growing wings assume the life of a bird.

I can travel beyond our solar system and look at planet earth from a long way off and maybe encounter forms of life that have different prepositions than we do prepositions that reflect another dimension say a fourth dimension in which space is very different and is mostly acetylene laughter exotic swimsuits and weddings in semantic luminescence.

I can feel a stretch of sand made beautiful by the cold hard objects of the sea. 

I can fly around over under sideways down remembering the Yardbirds on YouTube.

I can watch the newspaper fall to the floor with all of its news and photographs and come to rest and stay there until someone picks it up and puts it into the trash bin with all the other tragedies and wars and murders and weddings and obituaries and comments and editorials.

Because that’s what prepositions do. They occupy space. They spur conditions. They cut the air. They humor the words of a sentence into performing ordinal acrobatics. And there’s not much I can do without them. I can’t go up. I can’t go down. I can’t understand a single thing. I can’t get over my dismay. I can’t stand by anything I say. Nothing unfolds. Nothing suspends. There is nothing to stand for.

Words in Chains

Words in chains are mechanical and garish. Thistle insinuates hamburger in public and the words go careening through a paradox of rags. Nerves generate the delicacy of a pond and an elegy of cork blasts into clothing. The red gleam of a traffic light gleams on everyone’s hoods. We are all drivers. We are all behind the wheel of a sedan, a chariot of rubber and metal. This makes life a finger. A palette, if you will. The stars help Van Gogh’s canvases into existence. Candles do the rest. Nectar is aboriginal. Yoga mimics the fall of drapery. I would use a stomach for digestion, though a brain is better for the digestion of meaning, which is tough and juicy, and tastes like impulse. The constant barometric pressure of a maraschino cherry. Stars cackling in oblivion. Well, it’s not funny, not really, but who can help laughing? Eternity is a joke, like the behavior of water. The punch line never stops. There is nothing that does not in some way feed on the realm of the eternal. Luster is appointed by county sheriff. Poetry is an engine, an ecstasy of pistons and goo in which wool equals wool and conviction gouges music out of calculus. Yes, calculus, that catalogue of mathematical expression in which popcorn anticipates the architecture of a lip. What is life? Oysters. Embarcation. Biology and wax. The blue of the sky unbosoming itself in bells. The majesty of puddles whose calm reflects the rambling clouds and a moose on the loose. Rattan ejaculates rattan. And a chair is born, with someone sitting in it, I believe it is a man named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. What’s he doing here? Did someone invite him? Oh well, never mind. Who am I to judge? I just live here, that’s all, hinged to commas like a common lawnmower painted by hand. Yes, I will find meaning in anything, no matter what. Even scabs. When you think about it, scabs are sometimes the beginning of scars, which are the cuneiform of the skin. Let us then build an aluminum Superman whose cape is mirror-like and reflects a heavenly spinal cord. Judgments are the accumulation of many different opinions. If anything is to carry true weight, it must be nailed together carefully, you can’t just shrug it off and expect your identity to start the car. Identity is only an expression of Spanish diplomacy and goes on all summer. And then it becomes geometric and seeks out various adjectives to hang from its nipples like tassels, or padlocks. But look, there’s a vacancy at the motel! Finally, something that we can agree on as we move ever so much closer to the divine. We are but dust in the wind, so the song goes, and there goes John Wayne in Stagecoach, happy at last to be out west and in front of a camera. Must philosophy always be this elusive? When the wind goes through the trees making everything wiggle and murmur it is then that I feel the universe is talking, enchanting us with its own special language, which is one of glamour and geniality. The breath of angels. The sound of crustaceans walking across the sand in a clatter of assertion. The afternoon in its stupor of stone boils with genius, the dividends of nudity, the lips breaking into lagniappe and metaphor. The aromas of Rome the salts of France the dunes of Algeria. This division between life and death which is but an illusion. It ceases to appear that way when the oboe begins its solo, fleshy and reckless as a tongue, and the orchids dance in the whirling air.

Before and After

Before I begin to boil, I think of zeros. Do zeros boil? What is the temperature of boiling? Why am I boiling?

After I’m brought to a boil I evaporate. Do zeros evaporate? Now that I’ve evaporated, I’m a zero. I can write anything I want.

Before I begin to diagram the intensity of rain, I accrue interest in the milk of paradise. What exactly is the milk of paradise?

After I look up the Milk of Paradise on Wikipedia, I put everything in majuscules because the Milk of Paradise is now the Milk of Paradise. Which is Laudanum.

Before I exaggerate the effects of the river, I describe the river. The river is a tarantula of water walking over the land in mathematical diamonds. Mathematical diamonds are different from real diamonds. Real diamonds look like broken glass and are mined in slavish conditions by men who descend deep into the earth in temperatures as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit where silica dust is an ever-present potential hazard so that all drilling dust and loose rock has to be wetted down to prevent silicosis, a lethal disease that attacks the lungs. Mathematical diamonds are imaginary and abstract and resemble the occurrence of bones when it is silver and long like a neck and moves luridly and powerfully over the land making everything shiny and wet and the glint of the water gurgles and burbles in a song of ice.

After I exaggerate the effects of the river I realize I have not exaggerated it enough because it is still walking around in this sentence as if it were Bob Dylan or something.

Before I go to bed I grab a copy of Finnegans Wake so I’ll have something to read before I go to sleep and a pair of earphones to listen to the radio when I’m still not sleeping and I can listen to a bunch of wacky talk on Coast to Coast Radio about hairy humanoids stalking young ranch-dwelling women, wolfmen, dogmen, large predators, ultraterrestrials and Black-Eyed Kids.

After I get up the next morning I make breakfast and watch the news on TV5 Monde, a French cable station. The lead story is about the crash of Flight AH5017 in the desert of Mali carrying 116 people from Burkina Faso to Algiers. The camera moves over the ground revealing small debris, a piece of metal there, a piece of wing there, the ground blackened with fire and impact.

Before sitting down to do some writing on the computer, I have to play with the cat. Otherwise he will keep getting on my lap, tapping me on the arm, attacking my feet and going behind the couch to play with the wiring which he knows bugs me.

After playing with the cat, I procrastinate doing any writing by looking up the month of August, 1964 on Tunecaster to see what the hit songs were for that month fifty years ago. I don’t remember most of them except “How Do You Do It” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles, “The Girl from Ipanema” by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters, “Tell Me” by the Rolling Stones, “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” by Jan and Dean and “The House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals. It is the latter song that changed the course of my life. I went from being a goofy teenager riveted to late night movies on TV to a serious minded teenager riveted to a late night movies on TV.

Before opening the hatch on my spaceship, I check to see what the temperature on the Martian desert is. It’s 68 degrees Fahrenheit, but with only trace amounts of oxygen. The atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, 2.1% argon, 1.9% nitrogen and full of suspended dust particles, giving the Martian sky a light brown or orange color, which is quite pretty, but also mesmerizing in its otherworldly calm.

After donning my spacesuit, I walk to the lip of a crater and look down to see a swimming pool surrounded by ghostly, holographic figures lounging poolside or floating on inflatable mattresses. I recognize Johnny Carson, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Jim Morrison, Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Emily Dickinson, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Sarah Bernhardt. I go down to join them but they all disappear as soon as I get to the bottom. I find this irritating, but what can you do? Sometimes an hallucination is just an hallucination.

Before returning to earth, I check the control panel and fire up the engines. Everything seems to be in order, though I don’t like the rattle coming from the ion thrusters.

After returning to earth, I run for president. I am soundly defeated. I decide to give up politics.

Before going for a run, I check the weather on the computer: it’s 71 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity at 58%, precipitation 0%, and wind at one mile per hour. That means I’ll wear a short-sleeved shirt instead of a long-sleeved shirt, short pants and running shoes. I’m not into the barefoot movement.

After running, Roberta and I have dinner and watch the first episode from Deadwood. We’ve recently finished the Lovejoy series in which Ian McShane played a roguish antiques dealer and were eager to see him again as the sleazy saloon owner, often referred to as the “slimy limey,” Al Swearengen, who was an actual historical figure and a key player in the development of Deadwood, South Dakota. He ran a notorious brothel named the Gem Theater for 22 years, combining a reputation for brutality with an uncanny instinct for forging political alliances. As McShane plays him, he is cagey, splenetic, devious, tough, callous, colorful in speech and very, very smart. As his character evolves, one discovers sides to his nature that suggest a nobler being hidden beneath the layers of sociopathic villainy. According to the obituary of the actual Al Swearengen, he was found dead in the middle of a suburban Denver street on November 15^th, 1904. The cause of death appeared to be a massive head wound.

Before sparkling, my drivel swells into a hammer which I use to build a word house.

After my word house is built, a pair of nouns move in and raise a family of adjectives.

A Brief Visit to the Nineteenth Century

I have collected in emptied Gatorade bottles and other assorted plastic containers what must be six or seven gallons of water; enough to flush the toilet several times, wash my hands, maybe a few dishes. Who knows. Maybe even “shower” if the water department doesn’t have the water back on by 2:00 p.m. as they promised. It will be cold. But I can pour water over my head. I know I can do that because I’ve seen it done in a gazillion westerns. The day of the big showdown what does the handsome gunslinger do? He goes to a pitcher and bowl in the window of his hotel room overlooking Main Street and sloshes himself with water so that he can smell of lavender when he puts on his Colt .45 and strides out the door to his victory or his doom.

That’s correct. I’m about to go on a journey back in time to the Nineteenth Century. To Jesse James and outhouses and women in Victorian dress baking bread and stuffing poetry in drawers with lacy underthings and sachet bags. To muddy main streets dotted with horse dung. To creaky windmills, player pianos, enticing lounges, inviting easy chairs, jolly prostitutes and antimacassars. To stubborn mules and gold nuggets and babbling brooks. To the hand-cranked pump on my grandmother’s prairie farm. To squeaky brass beds and horse blankets and chickens everywhere. To player pianos and hot air balloons and P.T. Barnum and the Pony Express.

And to what or to whom do I owe this voyage back into time? Sir Richard Branson? Bill Gates? Larry Page? Sergey Brin? The ghost of Steve Jobs?

Nope: the Seattle City Water Department.

The main water valve to our building is shutting off at 8:30 a.m. in order to prevent any debris or impurities into our water system. The water department is shutting the water off at 9:00 a.m. to repair a main water valve for our neighborhood. Water will be shut off for X number of households within an area of approximately ten city blocks.

This is a first. First time that I’ve lived in a modern U.S. city in which the water was turned off for an entire neighborhood. And remember, this is Seattle, not Detroit. This is the city of Amazon and Boeing and Starbucks and Microsoft.

This is not, admittedly, the first time I’ve had my water turned off. That happened forty-five years ago, the same year in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left boot prints in the lunar dust.

I’d been living for two weeks in a small trailer in Arcata, California in back of a Mexican restaurant. I was renting the trailer from an old man named Rocco who was forever digging and planting potatoes in a small vacant lot, wearing a welder’s cap and maintaining a small drop of snot on the tip of his nose that never seemed to gain quite enough mass to go ahead and drip to the ground.  He was illegally tapped into the Mexican restaurant’s water supply. Whether they were privy to this use or complicit in the malfeasance, I don’t know. What I do know is that my water one day disappeared and I had to walk to the water department before attending classes at Humboldt State to find out what was going on. I walked into a spacious office where a number of clerks and water officials looked up at me. I explained the situation. They told me the water was shut off because it was illegal to obtain water that way. But what am I supposed to do? No answer. A shrug of the shoulders. That’s your problem, buddy.

But an entire neighborhood? This is a first. Something, the guy at the Water Department explained (after a solid twenty minutes of listening to Irish dance music on the telephone and being bounced from one official to another), to do with a main water valve requiring urgent renewal.

Which leads one to wonder how it managed to find itself in such drastic condition in the first place. I mean, check me if I’m wrong, but we did put a man on the moon forty-five years ago, right?

Right. So what was that again? A bad water main. Which (according to the aforementioned official who fielded my cranky call) would be very bad if it weren’t replaced. Meaning everyone’s furniture will be floating in muddy water all the way to the ceiling if it breaks.

So at 8:30 this morning it’s goodbye, 21^st Century. Hello, Nineteenth Century.

Meanwhile, as if in blatant mockery of the situation, it’s raining. Hard. I can hear it. The trickle trickle pitter pattery shhh shhh sound of rain pelting leaves and soil. It’s a chill November day. Except it’s not. November, that is. It’s late July.

Seriously: late July. And it’s like frigging November outside. Goodbye planet earth, it was good knowin’ ya. Hello whatever planet this is. The planet in which Florida, the Florida Keys and the Maldives disappear. The planet in which tornados and hurricanes of enormous freakish power become the norm. In which mass extinction occurs. In which the water department shuts off the water supply to the households of a major city. To repair the valve to the rickety water main. Which dates from the Nineteenth Century, I’m guessing.

I get some breakfast made and the dishes cleaned before the water disappears. Scrambled eggs, toast with strawberry jam, grape juice. I’m ready now. Ready for the Nineteenth Century. Ready for Regency Dress, candlelight dinners, hay rides, cattle drives, Winchester repeating rifles, Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, stovepipe hats and gunslingers. Ready for rowdy saloons, swinging chandeliers, frilly hoop skirts, ballroom dances and Walt Whitman. Good old Walt. It’ll be great to see the old guy again. Thank you Seattle City Water Department. Thank you for this brief visit to the Nineteenth Century. Thank you for helping me to appreciate the miracle of running water. It is, truly, a miracle. Thank you for this miracle. I mean, once you get everything running again.

Understanding Marble

First the neon is manipulated into utterance. Then the listening reaches meaning. Conflict vowel the gorilla suddenly buttons. I am antennas pounding toward a hose as biology assumes the comedy of eyes, he thinks. Sweat since amaryllis flames. The enzymes meanwhile maintain a clever inflammation, or memory. The blood groove door stiffens vowels into hurricane characteristics. Society is palpable. It makes musical sense in and of itself. Beard how lagoon buckles the guitar of heated coagulate. Tabled momentum. Proud scarf parts rhapsody wheel sprinkling how propellers diamond like the epitome of noon. Native gloss shining on another river. Ding-a-ling since the microphone has life. An epidemic gland pumping nations of blood. A nation is a form of rhythm, or distinction, which organizes itself so that its gaps become visible. I brush my teeth with everything especially water, blood pulsing through a kink in the hose, at which point the safari must be a naked wire. We put our things in a locomotive history jarred in feeling. Gorillas pitch tacks. My lettuce brims with words floating in air. Frederic Remington messes with the timid bureaucracy of mass to make it all brawl. I have rapids pouring personality on a kitchen string. Saxophone which seemed to be a salamander ordnance. An adhesion to bamboo is a kind of diagrammatic cake. Busy tools of cinnamon farm bubbles with grass and nerves knotted in confluent air. Surf spreading with the cacophony of a cafeteria. The sound of form throbbing principle which energy necessitates to cherish an insect. I am out entirely grooved and cupped as if by birds. The fulfillment of flavor is clay for digesting lightning. Acorns pound toward the city ever since pentameter shattered the gates of philosophy. Thus coal lines the arithmetic intestine. Generous bold laughter. Surgery at dawn in a cage of ice and fire. There has to be an aura. A gathering for the mind. Death is a nozzled insinuation. Suddenly the timid fat that makes the tempo goofy is modestly aquatic. Reading is inundation. A form of incense falls on the arena and discerns special lighting effects. Once I intoxicated a bowl of equal temperament with logarithms until it spit pure distilled rage. Asphalt is embouchure. The management causes the arteries to expand with conflict. The saddle that indulges bruises. Notions of mud savor a gap not for its radius but for its mass. The membrane emits blue light at a muscular thought. Thought is muscular to anything that floats. Graceful eyebrow, or lumber. At such streams area argues life and carries black to huge saturations of coal, dimes between the guns plucked from a stem of intonations to strengthen the sunflowers till the pitch of eternity sails black when the moon is white and pink hemorrhages music. An apricot wound is never the same because its mimicry is thinking. Asparagus argues music. Indigo indicates that no emotion can exist without faucets and dripping and pork chops. Noise is bolted to cactus. It is instrumental to move with the moisture into dogwood, and then feel a glad idea of husks when the crocodiles become tools for this philosophy of fire to get laughing. A magnet is a dog. A dog is a magnet. Everything else is chemistry, an enticement toward understanding marble.

Dark Matter

Astrophysicists tell us that there is a dark matter in space which cannot be seen directly with telescopes because it neither emits nor absorbs light or electromagnetic radiation at any significant level. It’s simply matter that isn’t reactant to light. Its presence is inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, discrepancies between the mass of large astronomical objects and the luminous matter they contain in the form of stars, gas, and dust.

This astrophysical revelation has created a paradigm shift à la Nicolaus Copernicus. His De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), published in 1543, presented an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy’s geocentric system. Suddenly, human beings were no longer at the center stage of a universe created for our benefit. We were floating around a sun, just one of a million other suns, on a large ball of rock and gas.

Our comprehension of the universe was rocked again in 1932, the same year that Mickey Mouse was first syndicated, George Burns and Gracie Allen debuted as regulars on the Guy Lombardo Show, and Adolf Hitler got his German citizenship.

1932 was the year that Dutch astronomer Jan Oort shook the scientific world by demonstrating that the Milky Way rotates like a giant Catherine Wheel and that all the stars in the galaxy were “travelling independently through space, with those nearer the center rotating much faster than those further away.” This indicated that some immense gravitational pull exerted by an invisible matter must be the cause. Oort developed parameters that show the differential rotation of the galaxy called Oort Constants. From these it’s possible to infer the mass density of the Galactic Disk, much of which appears to be invisible. There, but not there. What may be holding it together is something called WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) that interact through gravity and the weak force, which is responsible for the radioactive decay and nuclear fusion of subatomic particles, and is sometimes called quantum flavordynamics.

This means that roughly 96% of the universe is missing. It’s made of stuff astronomers can’t see, detect, or even comprehend.

I find the implications of this quite enchanting. That is to say, the knowledge that there are phenomena not available to my senses nor for that matter highly sophisticated scientific apparatus offers quite a promising path for speculation. If there are phenomena not perceivable by way of our senses, how much that is “out there” eludes our sight and hearing and taste and touch and smell?

Dark matter appears to be composed of a type of subatomic particle not yet defined, quantum flavordynamics aside. I love these anomalies. The insinuation of snow where there can be no possibility of snow. Where snow is an idea, a potential, a matter in consciousness wrestling our perceptions into some mode of apprehension, despite their worldly configuration. Snow isn’t dark matter, but as matter goes, it’s pretty weird stuff.

So are lobsters. And rattlesnakes and waterfalls. But this is a weakness. I am encroaching too much on the perceptible world to suggest the imperceptible. Ghosts, for instance. The whole timid map of Hamlet’s hesitations and all those flowers Ophelia mentioned before she drowned like a water lily overcome by the imagery of romance. We all know there is something else, some other thing or things in existence that we can almost apprehend but that elude language, the efforts we make with words to paint phenomena into existence, into palpability. Into flame, sod, and linear momentum. Mohair, wisdom, a pudding of sound produced by a zither in a cave somewhere in Spain. The Yukon at dawn. An antique emotion moving around in our blood like a cat.

A black cat with iridescent eyes and a murderous ease. 

Is there a sound for sand? When sand is barely moving but evidence of its moving is available to the fingers, its grains tricking between our fingers in equations of fluent particularity?

There is a certain aroma in Rome that hints of lamps. That meanders over the kneecap like a hand. There is nothing mechanical about the numeral zero. Zero is not available to our nerves. It stands for nothing, means nothing. Literally. It is a sign for nothing. But zeros are involved in the search for dark matter. Quadratic equations attempt to unify vacuum energy, radiation and dark energy with a constant density equaling that of a Planck density and by doing so reveal (if we are lucky) the symmetry of an early universe of vacuum energy plus radiation with our more recent universe with radiation and dark energy. These are polytropic equations, or the raw spontaneity of conjurations made on the spur of the moment. In any event, all quadratic equations require the use of zero, as if zero were a kind of singing, an acacia in back of a church that anchors itself in the imagination when there is nothing else there to indicate cobblestones or gerunds. Nothing that isn’t ambiguous, ambivalent, or trout. Our blood will be our salary. Our heat will be our morality. Everything else is intricate and exponential, and so the room expands, and the heart with it, as our words emerge from the vinegar of description to reflect the message of parallels coming from the prodigal wildlife of a temperature in love with pi.

Dark matter, indeed. Words just glitter out of it, as if born there, as if born to a medium that breaks in the hand like a pod of water lotus.

Look at the clouds some evening when the sun goes down, how they accumulate light, flare it out in reds and violets and oranges and turquoise, then darken into shapes the honky tonk moon turns to different matter. To matters of better understanding. The humility of gravel. The snapping of veins against a startling nipple of fleshly undulation. And the world is so perpetuated by these yearnings that something dark comes out of it and bounces into the eyes in a strudel of electrifying darkness. And one’s being lights up in such ecstasy, to know that existence can be this audacious, this ability to stick to itself with such lyrical mathematics that occurrence is a whirl with apricot declarations and unscrupulous temperatures. And escalators act like tides. And words grow large and borscht in their sugar of grace.  

Desperado Earthquake

Desperado earthquake consonants walking into flight, deliberately boiling. Tumbles are similar to parakeets. You can open your mouth and let out a mutation. Dreaming is soft. Nerves tumid with candy branch out into rain. This is a way to suggest buds breed ermine and space hastens proof of a river to give birth to a scribble. And property and war. Lines in poetry happen when a color bangs into feeling. Propulsion is this occurrence of mountain, this consciousness which is hysterical. For mirrors are a daily peevishness to rhyme a door with or find understanding and resurrecting it in rivulets. I must come to a striking conclusion and say that on behalf of my habits I’m throwing you a shillelagh. Perception is the opera that follows the reeds to the wasp that peppers the air with buzz and photosynthesis. Branches sip the stars and products dwell in that which follows tumbling. That is a pleasant way to say popcorn pops best in a house of punctuation. Rain notwithstanding. Substance and crying is first adopted then rented then pulled into anything resembling watermelon. Understanding texture is spherical or black and movement is possible like a hotel. But a color, a color with a little meat on it can blow like a trumpet and if it follows my pen into description it may also seethe with music. A wasp has eyes and wings. Glowworms are overtures. And walnuts have plenitude in them transformation figures and auks on a sweatshirt that happens to be sincere. Platters that overrun convolution with notebooks. Musical crocodiles everyone could invoke, establishments of line swelling out with music. Note the orbiting tongue. Cake perpetuates merriment. Ballast puddles the flash. Go, pinch fifteen goldfish or jail the rain. The palm keeps its gasoline housed in its arteries. Mulch dogged by detachment. Bronze proclaiming symptoms of paper. This means mustang. And inventions like desperado thyroid escalators. The calculus of calamity. The coffee tub in a walnut and a rocket in an opera. One might conceive of a puddle as a parable. The skin of space by hooking packets of sugar embraces the grapefruit. The bamboo is not an illusion. Incense is more indiscriminate. Cold differentials jettisoned into crystallization, just like Friday. You isn’t fictive the crabs are its art as if phosphor flirts with calico and thirst plays with a suggestion in the mouth, creating a mood of introspection, wrinkled Cadillac and each headlight a marvel of engineering. The language of morning is an angel of plausible grammar. My mouth crashes through a poem but I cannot get the lid off of the jam jar. The use of a jukebox is that when its circles are lakes everywhere turns chrome and shines like a song. Build a river and everything quivers. Go crazy in a tent and fables of rotation turn ape and alp and tulips. The jeep has principles, dude. Pay attention. Always have postage available. You never know when the sand is going to riot in your shoes and getting a few pieces of sound down on a piece of paper will obtrude from you like theory. The stars outside the city are delicate as the skin of grapes. The air is gentle as jewels of light in a TV studio. Go wildly pictorial. You can do it. You can have it all. It makes you want to hunker down and disintegrate. Discover peculiar hormones and then go physical in a bowl of cream. Paper does everything it can to resemble vinegar. The Rolling Stones fishing for polyphony. And here I am a fringe on the outskirts of time. Lumps of constant relation to things. Twilight palms and dissipation. Drumming and gravity and color opening its bolts to stroll through a howl overflowing with church. Age is richly ornamented with slow salvos of dirt from your manifesto, my dear Dada Friend. Yes, you, the one with the desperado earthquake consonants on your lapel. Twinkling and flashing as if some voices were thick and others more like horticulture. I have overruled your servitude. My rhythms are going north. I have enough serration for a mountain of hacksaws. Tom Waits huddled in a tug. Airplanes in his hair.