The Story of the World

I’m carrying a gun. It’s an imaginary gun. It shoots hungry words. The words are hungry because the stars savor of oblivion. Because the ghost of an emotion sparkles in a pronoun, and horizontal feelings trigger tinfoil snakes.

I want out of the world. I’ve had enough of the world, and now I want out of it. The time has come to construct a rocket. Time has no texture. Inflation is attacking our money. The Kantian definition of the sublime is driven beyond its boundaries. A mongrel vowel crawls into a consonant and barks. No one listens. No one listens to poetry anymore.

Here is the world in a nutshell: an old woman with long gray hair shoveling dirt into the back of a battered truck. Self-reflection anticipates reconciliation with nature. And sometimes that happens. Evaporation never ceases to amaze me. Thick wet secrets of existence turn to vapor and float west.

Or east. It depends on the prevailing winds. Air pressure gradients and temperature. The colors of Corot, undulations in a field of alfalfa, a crack in the wall, a goldfish pausing to gaze out of its bowl.

Analysis is muscle. Opinion is spit.

My grip is strong. My spin is explicit. A metaphor writhes in a strangled lake. How do I explain incense to a bottle of gin?

Memories sleep in the morphine of wood. Bas-relief divinities hammer the stars. Kettledrums ooze from the syringe. I remove my sweater and hug the sky.

The house of poetry is made of air. It’s a haiku for refrigerating snow. It was that type of summer. The staircase exploded into birds.

Denim absorbs the attention of elves. I tell a joke. The joke drills into a buffalo and dances on a heresy of grass. I look at the buffalo. The buffalo looks at me. Its eyes are castles of ice.

It’s tempting to inflate our conversation with the helium of orchids. Energy lingers in the tide. My emotions turn into squirrels. The garden is hard to decipher, but with enough effort, we will come to understand the architecture of dirt.

I don’t like to travel. I like to flirt with metaphysics. My pancakes swim with blueberries and syrup. The atmosphere stirs with oracles. Each blueberry is a chapter in a novel of bald telepathies.

Symmetry is always a little intimidating. The oboe laments the inherent sadness of aluminum. I yearn for the endurance of fish. My chemicals release adjectives into the atmosphere. Swimming deepens my feeling for water. I would describe water as wet and clear and charming, like the shampoo of angels.

Have you ever been to North Dakota? You can go miles without seeing anyone. It’s marvelous to plunge a shovel into the dirt. They say that musicians paint with sound. Solitude paints with dirt.

Poets sell insinuations of elsewhere. Elsewhere is anywhere there is a stirring in a flower. The song is varnished with tears. Grebes swirl in the morning light.

I hate noise. I prefer the odor of thought. I prefer ink and emotion. The odor of thought is warm and gold. The hills of Iceland are stupefyingly green. The sky postulates rain. Morphine travels through my arm like a chocolate airplane. Elves ride by in chariots pulled by magnificent swans. You can’t beat elsewhere for its scenery.

The older you become, the weirder life gets. A headlight crawls out of the sand and points to the horizon. The leaves of perception eat the scorching sunlight of truth. Gravity has an ugly disposition, but beautiful imperatives. Light is transcendent. Ice cubes are ventriloquists.

I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. Early in life, you learn how to fake it. You fake smiles. You fake civility. You learn to restrain your more primitive urges. You discover the grammar of the universe. You discover nouns and oceans. Clouds are paragraphs. Lightning is punctuation. Eggs inspire participles. Verbs thrive in diversion. Indirect objects induce silhouettes, and cork.

The poem runs on eye gasoline. The tongue is a truck of emotion. Emotions are pulled from the deep swamps and bayous of one’s inner being and rolled out onto the highway. The cracks in the asphalt imitate the democracy of time. There is always a sense of urgency surrounding insects. Gas stations are chapels of extraversion. The wind fingers a vocabulary of iron. The sympathy of vagabonds is never restrained. Have you ever had an itch you couldn’t find? Follow your bones. Rejoice in the serenity of autumn.

I make abstractions of henna and lace. I make elevators of sticks and glucose. I’m hungry for altitude. I carve daybreak out of a vowel. I wander through books looking for cerebral sugar. The rattle of coffee cups. Heavy machinery, shouting men. Jack Kerouac sits in an armchair watching TV. The brain crawls to the horizon and cries.

I like the feeling of old shoes. I spread raw umber on my voice. Each time we write, we struggle to remove ourselves from our habits. An idea is just a caged utterance. If you open the cage, the idea disappears. The idea becomes a string in a jar of awkward guitars.

I live in a violent culture. The story of the world smells of blood and rain. Borders are hallucinations. I hover the world on crystal wings.

Inflammations of experience generate proverbs of scope and acceleration. Grape juice dribbles down the chin. Infrared bullfrogs hop into the future. Sweet melodic sounds swirl in the jukebox. There are over 300 songs in the jukebox. But only of one them burns like snow.