Dingdong

The neck of a woman is a treasure for the eyes. I lean my elbows on the table and imagine a life as a fullback for the inexpugnable musical comedy that is foliage. Leaves and twigs. The necks of women which are foliums of delicacy, columns of space and bone in testimonies of smooth delightful skin.  I approach everything from at least five separate directions and enjoy flavors that heave with description while at the same time solving arithmetic problems in svelte alterations of evening light.

The theorem is a syringe of words. It asks: can you eat clouds? The answer is no. I prefer oranges which are the fruit of clouds. The architecture of indulgence flows like a feather while we cultivate our mushrooms in the basement and our wings make shadows on the ground. Death wears a mask of magisterial beauty and drives to California in a silver Bentley where I too go in search of a past whose candles are a continuing consecration to the sheen of an imaginary piano.

Today, I walk into medicine rattling like a grocery cart. What does it mean to wince? To withdraw? To go into seclusion? Space surrounds us like an egg of light. What can you find on the radio these days? Nothing but hockey and static. Fat bright stars ejecting tongues of light into cold black space. My inner tumult is also my initiation. I have crotchets and I am proud of them. Some of them are found swimming off the coast of Spain still glittering in their original scales and coughing up bits of Precambrian dingdong.

Do you have confidence in words? Do you have confidence in these words? I like my habits. Each habit is a conduit to coleslaw, fat and silent like a thumb. They are what drive me. Propel me. Derive meaning from unlikely sources. Wax, for instance. Wax is the invention of elves.

Which is why I enjoy reading Proust in bed. I grow prepositional. Prepositions are the protein synthesized to hold the sentence together like molecular chaperones until everything gels in a cohesion of intracellular transformation and gets up and walks on all fours, breathing fire and defiance, flapping bat-like leathery wings and rising into the midnight sky where it lays the eggs of oblivion that are the golden stars of the east. Oblivion draws everything toward the stars. Transcendence. The precarious drapery of water vapor, and light, and the sentences of Marcel Proust, visible as luminous patches of moony squiggle organized to resemble sugar.

Thumbs are the monks of the hand. They testify to a manner of grasping the objects of this world in a colluvium of kewpie claudication.

Meanwhile, I fertilize prepositions with the sperm of comprehension. There are places ideal for communion. I seek these out in a spirit of dreamy gumbo-limbo, compound leaves and small white flowers. Flexibility is everything. The world changes in unpredictable ways. The outlet is haunted by the plug and the plug is haunted by a current of electricity. The medium defines its context. Questions increase with age. The punctuation of love flutters in a grammar of color. I have an ambition, but I don’t know what it is. Our license plate is no help. Our license plate is a theater of ice. It smells of mint and limbo. The sky walks on the mountains. A constellation in the northern hemisphere flouts our gloom with heraldic pleats and colorful aquarium fish.

Prepositions are biological. We know this. But the world is in crisis anyway. The spirit begs for liberation. A trip to Mars at the very least.

What is the purpose of creating a concept? A poem? A steamboat? A player piano?

I have roots in North Dakota. I hold a clod of earth in my hand. It smells of nebulas and nettle and the muzzles of deer. The open vistas of the prairie bruise our eyes with the glee and gumption of the wind. The emptiness is charged with clouds of unknowing. May our endeavors always be intriguing and vertical. May the breath of angels support our wings. Poets especially.

Poetry has force because it is so purely non-commercial. It is a marvelous blend of words and hallucination. My hands are potatoes. My legs are carrots. I dangle a verisimilitude over a hypothetical pancake. My wild denim pants stand when I stand. My shirt cooperates with my arms, which are the limbs of promulgation. The language of color opens my fists. I feel a music, a bacchanalia of dissonance and infrared, like warmed-over bepop. I see dimes soaked in silver spitting images of government. I hear the goldfish groan. The geography of a large emotion brings thunder into the parody of a barn. Science pushes cows and woodpeckers through words into reality. A poem forms. A theory of seminal propulsion percolates through its structure. It becomes radical with diversion. It is struck by lightning. Its eyes open. It’s alive! Alive I tell you!

I am Frankenstein stitched with wind and night. Let me tell you about my habits. My creation. My walk along the shores of ancient rivers. Of subterranean worlds.

This is the pain that ate Pittsburgh. And this is the tug that swallowed a sea. This is a sequence of words and this is a predicate based on cellular structure. This is a call to arms. This is the smell of swans treading water and this is the spin of electrons. This is a nebula of gas and gauze and this is the dimension in which opposites mingle on a long green wire creating the arithmetic of elevation.

This is the number nine. It’s a button on a panel. I press it. The elevator rises, an iron lion roaring into eternity, and the doors slide open on the ninth floor of a five story building. The clouds are fat and orange and all the appointments are open. What is true of water is true of chocolate and what is true of desire is true of art. The brook must churn in its sleep and there is meaning in cartilage and meaning in bone. Meaning in granite and meaning in meat.