Commonwealth

I hear a man with a hammer in the fog of the morning. Electricians with drills. The grind of the drill. The elation of an open garage filled with the obduracy of rags and paint cans and odd bits of machinery. Why elation? A convocation of things is always an elation.

The fabric of time is sewn with minutes and hills. It gets hot around experience. Sand demands the song of the shaping wind. Behavior calls for movies. Behavior is strange and we need to understand it. We need to see it on screens. Animal behavior. Human behavior. Humans acting like animals. Animals acting like humans. People in the underground rushing through turnstiles. The ocean regenerating itself with fish and fire.

The fathoms below are black as velvet and punctuated with the drift of luminous organisms. I am lost in thought. Rails walk into Mexico shouting sunlight and steel. What is inside of us is outside of us and what is outside of us is inside of us. Skin is not a barrier. It is a medium. It respects the vigorous air of winter and longs for the heat of summer. The smell of a potato dug from the earth. Shoveled up steaming and subterranean.

Here is a totem of whales and seals. Here is Jack Kerouac in an attic in Los Gatos unleashing a river of words. Here is a garish symptom of language declaring itself to be a hippopotamus.

I drive a taxi. It floats on butterfly wheels. I hover over the traffic. I pollinate traffic lights. They blossom into green. They blossom into red. They blossom into yellow and cause brief interludes of ambiguity.

My skin is mapped with experience. Not tattoos, wrinkles. Folds. Can you hold this theme a moment while I go put on a sweater?

Supposition is the art of sewing abstractions to water. I toss pronouns into the museum to hear them echo. I write on a black table in a coffeehouse at the bottom of the hill. A setter looks up at a man in a parka with a fur collar while a bald barista makes him a latté. A velvety voice issues from the speaker above my head: Nina Simone on piano accompanied by a cello. The candle is an arm of light reaching for the stars.

Depth juggles space. Consonants are toys. Vowels are power. Or is it the other way around? Space juggles depth. Vowels are toys. Consonants are power. Syllables brim with tinctures of dream. Nerves flourish with the sparkle of a bicycle. One can perceive perception and sew it together. Sew it together with words. Sew it together with hammers and flares. A battle. An itinerary. A commonwealth.