The Final Frontier

Language is the final frontier. Baudelaire inflates a balloon. I light a stick of incense. Together we prepare for the voyage. The voyage into language. The voyage into alibi and balm.

Pain is exotic. The more that you live, the more memories you will have. Perspicacity is propelled by despair. Truth attacks a pumpkin. Yet the pumpkin survives. The pumpkin is a lie. It is, in fact, a cucumber.

Letters build on a justification for stucco. This is why I like wearing mud and the mane of the Palomino. I find it touching that people choose to celebrate certain occasions. Yesterday, I saw a woman mowing the sidewalk. I celebrated by rubbing a lantern until a genie appeared. He granted me three wishes, one of which involved Grace Kelly and Joseph Cornell’s garage.

The weather today is vast and blue. The drugs I have taken confer prodigies of stick and paper. Why would anyone feel separate from the world? This world of pleasure, this world of pain. This world of sandwiches and bandages and rain.

My bones are ornamented with muscle. The house collides with fog. The fog feels like a phantom description of itself, soft and velvet and young. My muscles move my bones. I wear an elevator for a hat and a forest for a shirt. I get around, let me tell you. My father shoves cars at me. The Mediterranean spins on my thumb.

Skin is a process involving little holes called pores. You can use this skin to touch things, and keep your internal organs from falling out. Night rises into the sky and peppers the earth with stars. A ballerina spins in the air.

I know all the sorrows of the jukebox. I know how coal affronts the cold, and garlic and leather advertise the railroad, which is punctuated with cocaine and whiskey.

An angel perches on a crane at a construction site and sews rivers together with moonlight.

The physiology of ducks pardons the tyranny of water.

What we think of as ghosts is the emotional residue the dead have left behind. This is why airports are so exciting, and velvet and sawdust commit beauty on the floor of a barbershop.

If these words were steeped in thunder, I could tell you about my area code. But that will have to wait. This morning I took some codeine and listened to Mark Twain talk about working in a Nevada silver mine. I know I have a tendency to hallucinate, but isn’t language a hallucination?

I love the feeling of ivory. Dead leaves scattered on the ground. Sinking my fingers into the plastic tightly wrapping the box of Gatorade bottles until it suddenly breaks and I feel my fingers curl around the neck of a bottle and pull it out. It is a highly satisfactory maneuver.

And strawberries. Strawberries have a presence that is downright uncanny.

Do you smell something burning? Autumn insinuates itself into summer. It happens like this every year. Hawaii hangs on the wall and fairies dance in a ring. Infinity strolls scrupulously across the lake and we see ripples of some invisible power headed this way.