Gusto

The poem ignites. Its pistons growl into words. It crashes into reality. We ride its clattering hulk all the way to Liberty Road. We seek sanction. We seek employment in factories of apparitional loom. We find heroic diversion in worlds of blue and green. The colors of nature. The colors of propagation. The colors of rumination. The colors of myth and idea. The colors of gas and thought and coincidence and water. The silk of wisdom and the crimson of expectation. The colors of calm when you are expecting rain and the colors of anticipation when the reflections grow black and diagnostic. When cocoons are scrupulously quicker than mosquitoes. And imitations of life chatter like a circus of doors.

The wrestlers merge into life. The dream they enact is enriched by parable.

I run and flip my collar studs. I see a junkyard pulse with African violets.

Is there anything missing? I see a phonograph that sees me. Disraeli Gears spins round and round. The black of its vinyl and the needle in its grooves bring Cream into life.

Life is not a collar stud. Life is more like popcorn. There are times when all you want to do is ramble. You don’t want to say anything important or rich or denotative. Nothing indicative. But something spitting and greasy and exquisitely accelerated, like hunger, or correlation.

I want to be luminous and malleable. I want to be a blade of light. I want to enlarge on the peculiarities of increase and the actions of the mouth. The mouth, the human mouth, is charming and oval. When it opens, worlds issue forth. This world. My world. The round fat blue and white world that spins in space and tilts and limps and hangs and rocks. The world of throats and boats and riddles and rides. The world which is wrinkled with mountains. Which is daily and daffodil and dalmation. Which is nerves. Which is metal. Which is tropical. Which is everyone’s world.  Grebe and moose and brier and invisible powers that withdraw into the shadows.

Trees drip with the lingering moisture of a large gray dawn, a sweetness in the air of impending thunder, eddies and pumpkin. The rain is the arbiter of secrets. Push-ups across the sidewalk that our eyes find natural and our trumpets blast into history, while breakfast continues, and romance and wheels. Our thoughts are perturbed by the highway, and letters to the editor of the local newspaper are vigorously composed by pen and calliope. Despair, if necessary.

It is a naked pain that glitters in the hand like science. There is a mutation whose aesthetic is a position that we steady with belief, proverbs that incubate in an interior affluence of jewels and ambiguity. It is this constant flux that permits the validity of hunger to hurry into agriculture. There are sounds available to insert this into language. The clatter of cutlery, the allegories of napkins. The spread of butter, the dilation of thirst. The poetry of thread, the call of the wild. Even the menus seem tonic. As if the table beneath them pushed upward, like an act of gusto.