I Am Speckles the Clown

My belt buckle includes a cure for birch. It’s leather and conciliatory and foliage. I frequent my clothes in the morning and dress them in my body as if reflection on life were ghostly. It is. It is a ghost. It is like the greenery surrounding an airport. I elude it when the crowd sweetens and an emotion tumbles through my ribs in a nimble burning purity.  

I am Speckles the Clown. I act my bohemia vertiginously. I am a bowl of chowder rawhide raw. My ear chats the jug. My legs are emperors of mediation. The ground is my ground. The air is accessory to my notwithstanding. I am a naked pound of autumn. My addictions are subtle and will crash into you if prompted. I start at a penumbra to unravel the sky. I say to the sun: beam into me. I have an England to mirror. 

History is silly. It just is. I fall into its books with itching swollen pounds of postulation. Historically, the clown is a figure of sacred nonsense. I sway my spoons with amber. This occurs in the kitchen, which is inherently silly. What kitchen isn’t silly? Kitchens are silly.  

Food is silly. Eating is silly. Yet the camaraderie of sharing a table is not silly. It is sacred. It becomes silly when the jello arrives. Everyone sits stationed at their chair wearing a cap of bells. An aesthetic grammar unbosoms our smacking. You can tell it is aesthetic by the way it flops thinly on the hammerhead and spits. 

Break caustic we tongue. The grapefruit answers by forming a pulley. It creaks, and the words get happening. We are aghast with sandwiches. The exhibit grabs at our need for black and personifies plants.  

Extend oats to your endeavor if it does excerpts. And resembles a horse. It may be a horse. It may be clean and daylight and ruminative and matter. Gaze at your throat behind the blaze. If it trembles with syntax than a sentence is happening. You must hop through it violet and crumpled.  

There is a crab on the beach. It plays at its umpteenth vividness with legs and strength and landscape and sand. The railroad is extra. It just is.  

I embark on a novel. I am like that crab. I am the shovel of the feathers it dreams. My novel gulps assembly. Anything and everything. I think of oil and velvet. They become pounds of gnarly description, a gaudy sag to the nature of words. An abhorrence whistles a smell. Fireworks boil a headlight. Hammer on, dear nothingness, I say, hammer on.  

There is a resource that explains these things and explains its throats. I shout walking and demonstrate it by glass. I build a fence, since digging is indigo. This will be a chapter in my novel. I use a tablespoon to dig the potholes. There are roots. I work the spoon through the roots. The neighbor recommends that I use a pothole digger, and have children. He does not know I am a clown, and sometimes require the use of codeine. 

Crack, hear my plea. I say, go away neighbor. The neighbor goes away.

I rip the heat into pink. I can do these things because there are words to convey these events. There are propane and gasoline, and waves and dancing. Heft explodes the drum. Heft and sticks. I talk my fork into being in my book. This is it: my fork. It signifies fork. And napkins. Harnesses and horses are themselves. They tell the helter-skelter world that they are malleable, and like clowns. That is to say words expand into bedlam, and lose control in their own necessity.                                          

 

                                               

 

Office Envy

I envy people with offices. Lawyers especially, because they’re surrounded by books. Thick tomes full of laws and precedents and tragedies and spines with golden letters. Offices have an inherent respectability lending a feeling of solemn purpose to one’s endeavor. If you’re a writer, hoping for a quiet space to write when the world and its messy exigencies and blisters and blobs and children and fracases burst in on you at any moment, an office would be ideal.  

Or would it? Would the sobriety of rigid corners and thick oak desks and long shiny conference tables inhibit the impulses of creativity?  

There is something in the atmosphere of an office that imposes a need to conform, be polite, courteous, deferential, efficient. Creativity is the opposite of these. Creativity has nothing to do with efficiency. Or courtesy or obedience or tractability or acquiescence. Creativity arouses defiance, transport, ecstasy, fire, and subversive energies. There is always an element of destruction, of contrariness, of going against the grain. Friction, heat, angst, and selfish, riotous abandon. 

Writing requires a space that is outside the framework of time and its daily responsibilities. The Protestant work ethic, Lutheran sobriety, robotic, insect compliance. You can’t be a drone and an eccentric at the same time. Eccentric means, literally, you are outside the circle. On your own. A selfish jerk. Self-indulgent. Willful. Defiant. An insufferable prima donna. And probably poor and struggling to make the rent. 

Writing requires a space that is primarily mental. It has less to do with the physical dimension of walls and ceilings and more to do with how you feel. What are you capable of dreaming? Cooking up in that skull of yours? It helps to be a Prospero. A magician creating havoc and storms. An outcast with an impressive library and a head full of ganglions bursting with ideas.  

It’s difficult finding that level of sensitivity. It requires an abundant amount of idleness. Space for reverie. Drugs can help, but they’re more likely to create problems. Drugs are expensive and ultimately catch up with you and fuck with your health and sense of well-being. But you can learn to think like a drug. Don’t take heroin: be heroin. Don’t eat peyote buttons: be a peyote button.  

It’s really just a matter of allowing your self space to be. Being, in and of itself, is creative. Being is subversive. Hamlet was right on with his question about to be or not to be. That’s what it comes down to. Every time. To be or not to be. That really is the question.  

Midnight in Arizona

I am in a war against the literal. I have sewn these words together to make a stand of birch. I wander the earth gathering moon shadows and swords. Kerosene dots punctuate the Dakota night. An apparition of words hops through a calculus problem and falls into a trance. Rubber toys visit the sad navigation of a crew of astronauts, puzzled as they gaze through their porthole.  

The time is perfect for strawberries. I feel explicit and reproductive. I push my mind into words. Pronouns inflated with blood glitter like knobs. A wraith of steam is tattooed to an ocean doing celestial gymnastics.  

Experience is red when it slides through time. The airport runs wild with colors and rain, the atmosphere swollen with supposition. We assume we will fly. A crew of men grease the airplane. If there is enough faith to lift it into the air, we will arrive in time to see Arizona open itself to the wax of opinion. 

There is a cactus that pulls on our eyes and makes us see its full reality. There is a motel nearby with appliances that swarm with buttons and power. Beds like angels bouncing on a description of bone.  

I’m sitting at a desk, filling a page with muscle and sound. I believe the fork is a form of frozen fire. I hear the depths of the ocean hanging upside down. The color green mocks the turquoise water and salt and mistletoe lead to a brutal relationship with the planet. We seek redemption in the anguish of construction. We employ string for our amusement. The joining of wood is a pleasure measured in sawdust and dusk. A pool of emotion sweetens the shiver of ghosts. If I pull the curtains open, I can see various forms of movement deform the frontier of gravity. 

I fold my emotions and put them in a drawer of the heart. Anguish slobbers with thorns and balloons. One of them pops. A shattered mirror goes in pursuit of a lip.  

Morality enhances the experience of clothes. Nudity is something very different. If I write down a description of a woman’s breast, the paper grows profligate with symptoms of palpability. I carry the sky in a basket of clouds. I look for signs of monarchy. The genius of clouds bridges the crackling sky.  

Fingers were invented by doorknobs. That should be obvious. Checkout time is noon. It is always noon. Midnight is so very different. It tastes of impending intrigue. An excerpt from Baudelaire blazing on the page like a road flare.                    

  

 

 

 

Philosopher's Egg

We walk upright, our skin is naked and tender, our capacity for invention magnificent. Our sensations galvanize us into action, the depiction of animals of stunning grace, the murmur of subterranean rivers.  

A rag of infinity has been ripped from the wall of time and hangs here, a moon shadow trembling with claws. Picture this: strawberries sparkling with freshly fallen rain. It is a false image. It is the image of a pronoun stuffed with strawberry jam. Every time I push my mind to assemble these things with a set of words I feel like a washing machine grown arrogant with buttons and power.  

Can you believe everything I say? Anything at all that I say? Yes. Believe this. Believe that money is the fecal matter of the spiritually bankrupt. 

I believe that there are certain pains that glow like a whisper of crystal. And that the right combination of words will climb into the sun and become a giant cabbage running wild with colors and bombs.  

Emotion auctions the heart. It goes to the highest bidder, who is a woman of 40 from Beaumont, Texas. She takes a drug that causes silk and literature. One day she will be on television. Meanwhile, she is happy to flutter through the room like an insect with black shiny wings and nipples like dead violins. 

A Rembrandt brown walks across a canvas exasperated with bad jokes and convulses in the wind and rain. A swirl of universe sputters in the mouth like a mountain brook in love with communism. It says surrealism is alive to the unraveling of perspective. Well, I already knew that, but that’s ok. I still enjoyed writing it down.  

Words tremble with strange demands. They celebrate the spine of a divine scintillation. Their hallucinations seize the wind and fall into hypnogogic sensation. If anything of this is too vague, please let me know. Right now I am filling a void with the ageless exaltation of antelope bounding over the crest of a butte in Wyoming. Later I will set the oven for 350 degrees and slide a tray of lasagna in. All of this will later become apparent in emotion, sensation, and dreams, which are the alembic the alchemists called a philosopher’s egg.  

This was written in my sleep in the year 2013 using a bottle of perfume, a journey of universal connectivity, syllables secreted into a web of convulsive silk, and eight supple legs scampering about with an animal eye and a pound of sound condensed into teeth.

Steeped in Alias

I am steeped in alias. Veins inflated with pronouns. Identity is mostly steam from a boiling despair. My palette glitters with its toys. My swamp widens into exhortation. I dribble parables. The mouth is a house of malleable infantry. I carry a city of stentorian sounds.

Here comes a float heaving with pink. Take the moon elevator and strike the water. Grease happens when the engine is broken. Catch an airplane and prickle it into knobs. I write almond and cook it into fiddles. There is an oath that lifts it. And an oath that demands granite.  

I got spectrums. I got packages and mail. I got maturity and cream. We are together in this world. We are beyond recognition. We rattle and stomp. We summon angels and bounce.  

There is a tiger we sputter and a perception we wobble. We watch it progress into poetry and behave like a sky. Black makes it real and blue makes it feel. 

We manufacture what excites us. The heave of labor is built within the saw. Slide your ponder to the tip of the branch. Mushroom your flip into scent and sensation. It’s not a joke. Not entirely. Some of it is broth and some of it is both.  

We haul our hands by fingers. We navigate digits by fireworks and thought. We beg this emptiness to think. A spoon opens its energy and the road is suitably squeezed. War the genetic clench. Become a muscle in a Mediterranean garret. 

I seek the tolerance of dawn. Soap is for scrubbing the sun is for scrounging.  

Generate life by crashing into light. Diagnosis boils with the morality of the seashore, which is enhanced by cloth and amusement. Your cactus cuts please cut it out. The mirror is tangled in its own listening. Your face sounds irresistible. 

This is my wild cabbage buckle and this is my myriad minnow tilted into heresy. What bomb do I drop to see your spectral elegance? I bungled the hammer. Description is exasperating. We’ve picked the headland clean. There are only a few skates and speed bumps left to talk and catch the last light of the setting sun. Let us ruminate on pursuit.  On the pools and illusions as the dimming light sweetens the distance and ghosts tug at Cézanne. 

I am swollen now, and full of gnarled emotion. The garden path is teasing. But the gravity across an airplane accepts it to mirror the chrome.

 

Things Seen Recently While Out Running

A giant inflatable Santa Claus in front of a dilapidated house.  

A chow chow wandering among the figures of a crèche, wagging his tail. One of the wise men topples over.  

The day after Christmas a man stands outside his pale yellow house with a paint roller, painting over the words ‘ASSHOLE” written in huge red letters on each side of the house.  

Multicolored Christmas lights entwined around two white columns on a Dutch Colonial porch, steam venting from a brick wall, odor of fabric softener scenting the winter air.  

A middle-aged woman with blonde hair wearing a fur coat glides through a four-way stop in a black SUV just as I come running across. When I am inches from her window, she glances at me with a look of indifference.  

Frost on a bed of ivy.  

A thick layer of ice on the sidewalk, remnant of a garden hose left running.  

Black silhouette of a man walking on a yellow triangular sign against an opalescent sky in late December. The sign is a warning for disabled pedestrians. Yet the iconic man on the sign is walking robustly.  

The man gets down from the sign. He slides down the pole. He has no features. No nose, no eyes, no ears. He is simply a man walking. He is a sign. He is a sign of walking. He is a parody of walking. He is a flirtation with walking, an icon designed to catch the attention of drivers. People behind the wheels of their cars. Or motorcycle handlebars. Look out, the man says mutely in silhouette, there may be people crossing here whose bodies may have been compromised by age or injury or disease. But the man is momentarily gone. It is just a yellow sign. A yellow triangle. The man on the sign goes to the library to read a book. He reads a book of silhouettes. He reads a book of signs. He learns how to warn people. He learns how to deliver a clear message. He returns to the sign and climbs back up. He assumes his position, his left leg moving jauntily forward, his expressionless silhouette communicating a message as clearly as possible. Watch out. Pay attention. You are in a car. I am on a sign. Together we make a world. A world of warnings and signs. A world of attention and solicitation. Highways and maps. Incongruities and substitution and straw. Fickleness and treachery. Gladness and compassion. It’s all there. It’s all a sign. A big sign. A sign of sagas. A  body of law. Sunlight burning through mist creating opalescence and thaw.