Full Rolling Boil

There is a politics that does not intertwine with the skill of your life or mine. Wrinkles on a nipple signal the opening of an aperture. I nail my breath to an image of war. Gravity tumbles through space. Light convulses on the floor.

All politics is moral. Our brains float in a common dream.

It is exhausting to have to make certain decisions. Must it always be the lesser of two evils? Must it always be a matter of food or medicine? Politics or art? Kidney or education? Ghandi or Glock? Martin Luther King wisdom or Viking berserker rage?

I like watching astronauts swim through space. Cows intermingling with cows, nerves intermingling with nerves, words intermingling with words, stars intermingling with stars. It makes the universe appear more, I don’t know, sentient.

The house of autumn is built with the lumber of summer and the bricks of winter. The windows are ice. The doors are runes. The walls are hemispheres. The furniture is Etruscan. Some might call it a home. Some might call it a palace. I call it a paragraph.

Where are you? I mean, right now, this minute. I’m at home. The garbage truck is backing up the easement, beep, beep, beep, beep. There is nothing in this universe that is totally isolated.

Our house is covered with snow. Ganglions transmit the sensation of cinnamon to the enamel of the mind. Writing causes the world to become a calculus of words. Yet nothing is so calculated that it ceases to lose its mystery. I love my shoes. But I don’t completely understand them. It is more accurate to say that they understand me.

I’m a magician. England explodes into fireworks. The world slowly takes us deeper into winter.

Winter. Where the landscape is combed gently by the wind. And mongrel hounds howl at the moon. Winter has a way of highlighting form. The world carved in relief.

The necktie boasts of a structure based on meticulous method. Space dreams of paint and holds itself in a frame of gold.

Everything else is locomotion. I love taking a warm shower after a run in cold winter rain. It helps me to realize what a metamorphosis might achieve if it were set loose on a shoulder blade. Or bones in general. Including teeth. Are teeth a form of bone? Or are they apportionments of stone?

Pain visits a tooth, and endures. Pain must always be addressed. With respect.

What is the smell of a mirror? My clothes flirt with sculpture. My words boil with existence.

We sit in a lounge gazing out of our sad, interior frames. The seats are raw sienna. Cartilage buffers the actions of the bones. Bones are examples of passage. The philosophy of examples is an example of philosophy. Later, we gather under the branches of a swaying willow to discuss standards of rationality and under what circumstances it might be ok to forfeit one’s moral goodness in order to obtain a desirable object, say a really wicked tattoo or 18th century pepper mill.

I have often considered the glitter at the court of Versailles to be similar to the joys of huckleberry. I have some metaphysics in a little pink jar that just might answer to this sweet languor now imbuing my muscle.

Solitude is the ultimate balm. Solitude suits me like a finger fits a hand.

I am a tidepool in clothes. Chromosomes, metazoans, mitochondria, eukaryotes, ancestral cells linking and commingling in symbiosis. Which makes solitude questionable. Which makes me questionable.

It’s always good to hear from an old friend. There are places I remember where society felt good and less bewildering than it is now. I accept the wisdom of horses. They know what it is to run in a herd, yet maintain a certain distance between themselves.

See the hives? They’ve been placed closer to the shore. Though I’m not sure why. I asked an entomologist and he merely bowed reverently before a giant black beetle.

I’m a mammal. I have two arms and a glockenspiel. I can see that density happens to a pitcher, which assists the pitcher in holding water, and so making it of use, though if it also happens to command a certain beauty, who can say that beauty is a fundamental composition of the pitcher, or that beauty and density work together in a synergy of indomitable force?

And certainly not just for our benefit. The anecdote evolves a spout. Not because it has a lesson to teach, but because it is a fiction, and like all fictions, its truths must be filtered through a screen of cynicism and doubt.

Yesterday afternoon, just as the sun had slipped past its zenith, we rescued an angel in the rain. Suddenly, that biography of a doorknob I had begun, took a strange turn. Mick Jagger entered, and handed me a spine. I didn’t know what to make of it. He left without saying a word.

I know that music has a soothing effect, but when I listen to the songs in the pipes of our building, I worry. Worry that the plumbers will need to be called and leave us with another stupendous bill. Money is exciting if you have it but if you don’t have it it’s not exciting at all.

The solitude of winter shapes our perception of the cement. The sidewalks are more precarious. They have little, if any, aesthetic that appeals to our sexual being. I hold a frog in my hand. I feel its little life pulsing. It’s exciting to hold frogs. Exciting to fold waves of consciousness into paragraphs. Lovely paragraphs with sugar and sand and dreams on our tongues.

I wonder if I might be able to repair the broken rib in my umbrella, or whether it might be simpler to crawl into a shell and become a hermit.

The story approaches its own exile with a certain sang-froid. Grapes fortify our reunion. Do you know what it is that women want? I do not. The woman upstairs is a total mystery. I think her tongue is haunted by the fourth dimension. All of her words come out sounding like hammers and valves. Snow falls on the intestines as the hunters depart, and everyone gets a taste of the cosmos.

Nothingness is reflected in the insolubility of adjectives. The sky paints the air with rain. But who can say what color it is? Is it gray, or pearl? Gun metal, or ash?

One day, the English language gave birth to eternity. I saw meanings gather around a cataclysm and a man in Sweden leap over a speeding Lamborghini. If mustard disturbs the palate, it is because nature itself is oceanic in her operations, and occasionally speaks to our inner sea.

War divides the world into privilege and poverty. The monotony of Texas, the combustions of Pakistan. I stopped to tie my shoe and got bits of moss under my fingernail. An ambulance whizzed by howling, smelling of emergency. Dead leaves whirled up from the ground.

There is a story in each particular, a story in evolution, or a story forged in conflict.

The story of my life. The story of your life. Continues. In different directions. Down different streets. But interrelated. Preserved, like words, in a marmalade of sound.