Broadloom

The logic of veneration is rubber. How does the egg take form in the chicken? Is it rubber? Is rubber involved? Probably not. The truth is it’s calcium. Anatomy, concentration, and pianoforte.  

Mosquitoes, meanwhile, hunger for blood. Baudelaire sits down to breakfast. He ponders his eggs. They’ve been scrambled. But this answers nothing. The true answer is light. Morning light. Clean morning light.

 

Morning light. 

My perceptions sparkle with intriguing problems. The past, for instance. The past is not so easily done away with. We’d all like to live in the present as Mr. Alan Watts encouraged us to do. But the past is a drug that accelerates the mind. It’s hard to let go of the past. In the morning the stars abandon the pavement and return to their homes in oblivion. But as the eyes open to consciousness the past seeps into the mind like the smell of twine and straw in a North Dakota barn. Cows wander the valley. A huge frog leaps into the water: kerplop.  

I have constructed this emotion with tinfoil and stilts. I wear the mask of a typewriter. I have roots in Minnesota. I have a glass hat and a junkyard monstrosity pregnant with parables. My labors are varnished with hope. The desire to escape desire is itself a desire. And yet the great blue sky is dear to my hoe and there are so many verbs I don’t know what to do with them all.  

I operate a tug outside of Baton Rouge. I do this in my imagination which is where all the fun is but there is no paycheck for me at the end of the month.  

Poetry is like that. Adjectives float in a pool of English and our intentions do not always agree with the directions our minds take.  

I have a map of Kentucky, but that does little good. I’m not in Kentucky. I’m in a state of mind I call Broadloom. I am hectic with reflections. I weave them into gearshifts. Which I then sell to automotive dealers. Who tell me that a wool gearshift will not work effectively. I should use denim, at least. 

I make inquiry of a cloud of vapor. I pound on a cloud of vapor. The vapor responds with more vapor.  

 

I love the pointlessness of things. The vaporiness of vapor. The brickness of bricks.

 

The simplicity of the spoon celebrates the grace of abstraction. I sigh, and sip some coffee.

I fold the day into an anecdote and pin it to the wall.