Plinkety Plunk

If nothing means nothing, anything can mean anything. Shoe can mean shovel and bacchanalia can mean badminton. I’m hanging over an abyss. It looks black down there. And deep. Deep and black and looking back.

And it is full of innumerable and endless worlds.

Innumerable and endless words.

Because words are worlds and marrow and marsh hawk are married in mass.

The more reality a thing has, the more numerable are its attributes. Even a monotone has shades of sound that opalesce in the ear when a register rustles along the spine of a sea snake or a bell rings in a filling station.

I once saw an owl on a fence in Wyoming. It was late. The owl had come out to begin its nightly hunt. But wasn’t awake. Or maybe he was there for some other reason. Waiting for a bus. The owl bus. The Wyoming Owl Bus to Owl City, Wyoming.

Animals don’t talk and so it is necessary to invent fables and things for them to say and think that in no way correspond to reality. This is one of the pitfalls of language. It gets in the way. It idealizes. It creates idioms and idiopathy. Idioplasms and idiosyncrasies.

If you drew a tree in front of a sun you would have the Chinese ideogram for east. Then what is west? West is a nest.

The mysteries lie in eglantine.

For it is the nature of a substance that each of its attributes is conceived through itself, as do bubbles and balloons that coruscate with fata morganas of jump rope pixilation. And grapes growing in New Hampshire and dishrags with faces and the faucets of old sinks and mists moving over elevations softening trees and rocks and a stuffed platypus on a player piano.

Hum de hum de hum. Plinkety plink plunk plinkety plunk.

Words are whirls of xebec serendipity. Form seeking form. As if ghosts of meaning needed shells of sound. And the rain was a grocer in a doorway sipping coffee. Kindliness in the kindling of a moment.