Lobster in the Rain

Space drools obsidian

On the mountains while I interact

With milk. I don’t really care for milk

But I do like sunlight

Served at room temperature

And this is how I became president

Of a fingernail. I think of orchids

And orchids appear in my mind

Somewhat crudely, like the drawers

In the bedroom filled with stratospheric

Underwear & the truth of crochet

Bursts like a balloon, shreds

Of plastic falling to the floor

Where they bounce into analgesics

Harvested from spider venom

Is there life on Mars? No doubt

There is a ghost hoeing the earth

Of a field near Walla Walla, Washington

Who smells of ceremonial resins

Smoked spices, burnt citrus, dry ice, quarry stone

Seaports, old flower petals, overripe fruit, spent fuel

And yesterday’s coffee. This is the ghost

Who was the first kid out of the house

To build a snowman. Sometimes fate

Feels like a turnstile

In apprehension of itself. Once I dropped a nail

And it sounded like an epitome

Edged with sawdust

Beside the white chickens. I need a haircut

Obviously, though the next time I decide

To construct a strawberry I won’t stir my brain

With a banjo but watch the dark genius of space

Arrive on a flatbed truck

Like a 2-ton stone of Chinese jade

And fall into consciousness slowly, like a gray sky

Flirting with the description

Of a lobster in the rain

 

Liftoff at the Court of Versailles

The balloon was a 37,500 cubic feet sphere of sky-blue taffeta held together by 18,000 buttons, coated with a varnish of alum and decorated with flourishes of gold and the signs of the zodiac. The crew consisted of a sheep, a rooster, and a duck. They were placed in a small wicker basket attached to the balloon by cords of hemp. Each time one of them was placed in the basket, they promptly jumped back out, barely missing the open pit in which the fire crackled. Some grass, seeds, and worms were deposited in the basket which ultimately persuaded the crew to remain put.

King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette pinched their noses to block the stench of smoke, a mephitic blend of burning wool, fetid hay, and old shoes. It was assumed that the smellier the smoke, the more buoyant the craft.

It was a warm September day. Hundreds of people gathered about the great lawn of Versailles.

The fire crackled, the duck quacked, the rooster pecked at a worm. The sheep let out a long vibrant bah as the balloon rose higher and began to drift over the palace.

Heads tilted back. Voices murmured.

Sacre bleu! exclaimed Marie Antoinette.

The flight lasted approximately eight minutes, covered two miles, and obtained an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

The basket hung still as the balloon floated weirdly and majestically over the topiary of Versailles and thence into the rougher countryside, diminishing in size as it began a slow descent and landed at the carrefour Maréchal in the bois de Vaucresson. The sphere drooped like a wounded celestial body as the wicker basket glided over tremors of green grass and came to a stop.

It was to be expected that the duck, rooster and sheep would be transformed for better or worse after attaining such height, but they appeared quite normal when the first people gazed into the wicker basket. The duck quacked, the rooster crowed, the sheep baaad. The animals were fine.

What were the thoughts that the crowd took home with them that day? The mind has a light that delights to dance on its own suppositions. For this is the day that flight became possible, and free will shined louder in the vineyards, whose bounty, it was said, exceeded all records that year. 

Incidents of Rubber

I lived in a garage in 1967

And then I moved to a bus

This is what poets do

They build parenthetical habitations

For their beads & spatulas

Their wonderful antagonisms

Their meaningful babble

Their velvet & lingerie

What is the harm in writing a poem

What is the harm in pursuing a life

Of writing poetry? It is simply this:

When we feel a rapier

Of purposeful

Purposelessness run through our guts

We know we’re on to something

Lethal. If you’re a poet who knows plumbing

Or law you will find acceptance

And the resistance of a metal

To denting. The dime shines

That is romantically awkward

Like a profession

When the abstractions become personal

And form is more than its content

It’s a consistency that cuts across the continent

Without leaving a trail of tears to secure

The idea of rope which is partially frayed  

Nor is it consummate like a stepladder

But acoustical like a railroad

Moving toward the sun

Of a particular feeling

Concerning Argentina. Vividness

Has a price. If the friction of life

Propels enough feeling that the water

Churns and the blood summons a purge

Then please join me in swallowing reality

And we will hum our favorite song of thread

Sewing our voices together in rhapsodies

Of something instead of nothing

I need a good camel

To the get to the end of the next sentence

And murder distance with a little velocity

Here is where the proverbs grow

In poverty & hardship & structures like oars

Bring us to the shore for a quick meal

And because the narrative necessitates a sag

In the bulk of time I will open a box

In the air & let the sounds find mouths

To say them, sing them, and otherwise snap

Into incidents of rubber 

 

 

Elevator to the Angels

I opened the closet door and there stood Eugène Ionesco lost among our clothes. I removed my coat and gave it to him and he kindly hung it up. Thank you, I said. Don’t mention it, he said. He exited the closet and sneezed and remarked on the art of hanging clothes, how it is haunted by so many prospects, so many hooks, and lends a certain tartness to life, à la the humble martini olive. Precisely, I said. This is the daily ceremony I look forward to every day, that and the glory of continuing my life as a Buffalo Bill impersonator, while I employ the arabesques of words to incarnate the tangle of the mind, and set forth on the prairie in search of stethoscopes and quail. So you write then as well, he asked. I answered humbly that I did. When water is vertical it becomes a waterfall, he said. Yes, I’ve noticed the same phenomenon, I answered. But what happens when we fall through ourselves into sleep? We fall into other worlds, he said. And these worlds are sometimes our salvation. How so, I asked. It is in dreaming that our narratives turn brisk and ultramarine and that our authentic selves leap into postulations of light and buy tickets to Paris. I’m frequently impelled by shoes, I said. But in my dreams, my shoes behave badly. They become prepositions and I can feel their leather creak with strange, metaphysical maps, notions of up and down that lose their meaning entirely, and I can go anywhere I want, which frequently entails flying. The interior of my skull is seized by a shiny, Pythagorean lust, and I need a camel to get across the desert, away from the chains of my brain, which smell of algorithms and creosote. When this happens I awake feeling clever and unconstrained, and this might last for a full twenty minutes, or until I get dressed. Once I am encompassed in my clothes again, the dream dissolves in a pink cloud of divinity. I make breakfast and prepare for the frictions of the world, which require structure and concentration. The table causes itself to press up to my hands and the infinite camaraderie of furniture become fugues of prophecy. I hurry to write descriptions of the greenhouse and experiences of hope and percolation that thicken into invention and understanding. I looked to see what my interlocutor would have to say of this, but he had gone. I checked in the closet. He wasn’t there. But sometime later as I prepared to go pick my wife up at work, an arm emerged from somewhere in the depths of the closet and handed me a soft, heavy coagulation of wool whose buttons of pearl and ivory smelled of accommodation, and whose sleeves accepted my arms like a meditation in silk. Thank you, I said. You’re welcome, came a voice from within the dark. Remember: you’re more than a coat, better than a shirt. Inside your clothes you’re naked. And that, my friend, is an elevator to the angels.

 

These Words

These words are dripping Delaware and these words are eating your eyes. These words are unpredictable and these words are clouds on Mars. These words are vomiting one another and these words are bouncing around in a palace of salt. These words have been harvested from the edge of night and these words smell of rum. These words are sticky and these words are cradled in philosophy. These words have one large blood red eye and these words have rails for the locomotive that is your blood. Blood is a word and so is locomotive. I’m looking for a good radio in which to put these words and golf my way through Switzerland drooling language like a locomotive full of blood. These words are grease marks and these words are looking for something to do. These words are vertical and these words are plunged in thought like a brass bell in a courtroom. These words are delicate as calculus and these words are twinkling in savory misunderstanding. I have harnessed some goldfish to these words as the Notre Dame walks through this paragraph plunged in verbal apprehension of itself. There is a headlight on these words and an ecstasy on Jim Morrison’s blue bus, which is eternal and photogenic, like a secretion. When I think about words I use words to think about words. These are those words. And when the words go their own way I tend to follow. I’m happy and lavender and follow them to the end of the world where proximity is an approximation and the planet rolls through its diversions, purposeless and prodigal as a dragon of dreadful lucidity spreads her gorgeous banjo wings and the empire of space carries a large red mouth in a small green jar.

Three-Way Bulb

I like math even though I suck at it

My arms promote the use of hands

As a warm climate climbs into me

And makes itself at home

I’m haunted by electricity

I don’t understand volts

Or amps but I do understand

Plugs and outlets

I speak with the pungency of fire

Don’t let me burn you

With the soft murmur of fruit

I’m only forming ideas

And ideas of form

A whisper of silver sewn into black

Like an insect crawling to the end

Of a branch and slamming the door

On my face. There are cinnamon twists

In the closet help yourself

No one else will

After the fog lifts it begins to snow

Quarks gurgle the density of experience

Can you hear it

It sounds like popcorn

In the fourth dimension

I wear the headdress of my nation

Which is an exaltation of larks

Coffee enlarges my consciousness

So that it no longer fits my head

I have to write it down

The luxury of pronouns allows this to happen

In the same way that delicate brushwork

Will tickle a jellyfish

How can I explain this paradigm

While I walk backward

With my eyes on stalks

Singing of ancient kings

If only to arrive at some form of conclusion

A sweeping generalization

So convincing that it may be mistaken

For a shirt. I withdraw into olives

And write a book of diamonds

Do not tease the tiger

Or you will be eaten

By remorse and these words

Are hungry for your full attention

I live in a country of endless war

Until we arrive at the border of death

And shavings of Parmesan cheese

Remind us of the good things in life

And the not so good things

Such as weeding & doing the dishes

I work in an olfactory

Membrane making smells

Appropriate to the human condition

I bring a cactus close to my face

And get to know it

Let this moment

Wrap around you like a stranger

Peaked roofs & a timbered façade

A singing nipple

And a white gazebo

Be careful I bruise easily

And this is my backyard

Gardens that flex their muscle

With artificial eczema

It is the turf of a northern climate

And these are the jottings of an old man

Examining his youth

Of lust & corruption

Like that of France

At the beginning of the Revolution

That are now just bits of truth

Contorted like pretzels

In the open light
Of a three-way bulb

 

 

Banging on a Drum

How do you do I’m a poem

I jingle when I walk

And sweat calliopes of salt

As the metaphors begin to boil

And the words crash into one another

Describing sand. There is a club for this

And a punch to the belly

We live in an age of nincompoops

The mouth pleads for an amiable nose

And gets a sunrise instead

But that’s ok I like the feeling of light

Falling on a punctuation of hills

As the great engine of Bach

Makes the gears and wheels move

The peremptory provocations of age

Permit me to say things

Behind the garage

They say time is money

I say time is a sequined dragon

In a milieu of hallucination

Called language

An apparition washes over me

Like a spot of grease

Redolent of beautiful gloom

Sir John Falstaff arrives in a Cadillac

And takes us the rest of the way

To the frontier of the mind

Which is a mecca for nonsense

What else can you do

But plunge into life

And when death comes

Crawl into a cocoon

It’s fun and intensely athletic

To let yourself go

If this were a song it would sound like water

But it’s not it’s a pool of blood

Banging on a drum