Eight Pounds of Feeling

Umbrellas are wonderful. Umbrellas are umbilical to being. The rain makes a certain sound on umbrellas, a patter and a splatter of spectacular matter. The umbrella flaps in the wind, bat-like, a membrane with ribs, and a pole, confusing it metaphorically with a bat and a pole and a house in the form of a membrane. Rain slides to its edges then drops to the world. Butters the sidewalk in alibis of water. The umbrella stages a resistance. The umbrella infringes on the asymmetries of rain. The rain is intense, then quiet, then intense again. The umbrella maneuvers the sky into a bivouac for the head. Spouts burble. Syllables drip. The umbrella angles upright in the rain. The rain insists on being rain. There are no metaphors for the rain. The rain is rain. The rain provokes. Incites umbrellas. The sky is held in place by bouquets of umbrella. This is silly. This is going nowhere. This is a swarm of words on hiatus from purport.  

Never cross a chicken with a president. Everyone wants to be president. Even Daffy Duck wants to be president. Daffy Duck is declaring war on the NRA. Go Daffy! Daffy Duck for President! 

Everyone colludes in a species of greed to create a city of watercolors. The sky is walking around like a drunk, crashing into walls and people. The Wisconsin sky lives in a trailer park and listens to Unchained Melody. Phil Spector enters a music studio and fires a gun. The musicians suspected, but did not know, he was this eccentric, this crazy about music.  

I often think of going to Iowa. Iowa is awake and wild. Spencer Selby lives in Iowa. Hi Spencer! Tornados harass the halcyon plains. Tornados have being, even personality. Sinister and crazed but weirdly organized. On April 14^th, 2012, a tornado entered the kitchen of Celestia Cobb, ate all the mayonnaise in the refrigerator, then deposited house and goods and Celestia Cobb in the middle of the Bermuda Golf Academy.  

The surface of the earth reflects the moods of heaven. Cracks, gorges, canyons, fissures. Erosions, abrasions, corrosions, rust. The crust is brown and beige and green and molten gold inside where Haphaestus works, making weapons for the gods.  

I miss the Beatles.  

I once wore a sweater of oxymorons. The sweater was modestly extravagant. Each yarn was a story of fury and repose. The sweater was immutably adjustable, like whipped cream on a cake of golden flutter. I was happy as a ball of yarn in a dream of wool. I was happy. I was happy as mucus, happy as a monument, happy as an ear full of Rubber Soul.

A figment is a fragment in the form of a dream because it has a spine and a big idea. Because it is spring in this crazy world and perfumes run riot and the flowers are in rebellion. Gothic flowers turning bad, illumined in the orange light of dusk. It is the Season of Hell. Noises from upstairs, creaks and thuds and cracks and bric-a-brac. We should drill a hole in the ceiling to see what that woman is doing.  

Today I am constructing a paragraph. Each sentence will be ten feet high, and contain a Jacuzzi and propaedeutic den full of incandescent Peruvian pleasures, implausible as they are mezzo forte. The grammar will flow west, where the sun walks around in a robe of salt, treading on the fourth dimension.  

Our cat is, in fact, a giant frog dressed in fur, soft and clammy as Klickitat. This is where frogs play poker, my friend, and mean it. They have long supple legs and long supple arms and Aces are wild and the Jokers have little ambition. The King of Diamonds is friends with an anthill and the Queen of Hearts does her laundry in Greenwich Village. 

I am either sedate or ridiculous I’m not sure which. This type of thinking reveals a strange apparatus. That apparatus is the apparatus of thought. The machinery is wonderful, it is everywhere, heavy and telling and ruminative, especially the machinery of love. Love is never in a hurry because the bus is driven by Little Richard and his eyes are aflame with Tutti Frutti.  

There is always the threat of nuclear war. Politicians sit in their bunkers and watch TV. David Letterman laughs and brings on his next guest, Death. Death arrives in black in a black hood and robe carrying a huge scythe. He sits down. His head is a skull. Even on television reality can’t hide. Especially when the television is on. Mass is a form of energy and that includes television and bells and the Second Season of Enlightened, with Jack White and Laura Dern. 

Where there is death there is life and where there is life there is faith and wigwams and abstractions and moods and necks and eggplants and singing and warts. 

Not to mention seesaws. If you saw a seesaw would a seesaw see you? I have seen the seasonal seesaws and they have sawn the sea.  

In half. In half, brother, two pieces. One for you. One for me. Like and like and like alike. I have to go. A young man is at the door delivering pizza, and is a collusion with art, which is an odor of many different distinctions. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. But this is jingles in a jaw, not a pomegranate. There is a thread of eyeball blood that helps an eyebrow bubble into its hair and slop itself against the cake of morning in defiance of all that is automated and patriarchal, and is eight pounds of feeling called a foment.