Thank You Space

I feel the need to thread some words through an eyeball. I lament the literality of the world. I miss the significance of glistening. An invisible power crawling out of a gray sky. The wonder of it. Shelley’s poem about it. I like decorations, too. Headlights on Christmas Eve. Fog and angels. Winter splashed against my forehead. The metaphor is a brocade, an appurtenance purged of embarrassment. The chair corroborates its mahogany. I can feel it. It’s stunning to mull on it. I dive into books. The room roams in quest of itself. There are trousers in the closet. But who says ‘trousers’ anymore? The shadow of a preposition wrinkles with hunger. It’s only natural to sit and wonder about such things among your clothes. This is what introversion was invented for. That, and philosophy, which is nothing like cactus. And yet, somehow, everything like cactus. There is a dissonance there that flames revelation. As soon as we grant an interior, we discover chiaroscuro. We find the right horizons, the ones that go on forever, just beneath the thumb. No universe is exact. Even the escalator insinuates a species of wilderness. Imperfection is the spring in the mattress, the one that squeaks a little, as it accepts the weight of the body. It’s the past that’s impenetrable, that eludes our substitutions. The paragraph operates by sprockets. No worry there. Just the usual mythologies eloping with halibut. I tried using a bulldozer for the salt, but to no avail. I climbed into some music and expanded my interest in elbows. How they bend, how they feel when you lean on them while sitting at some extraordinary table. Words are made of air. Air is breath. Breath is life. Therefore we swim in sound, shining and trembling when we reach the other shore. Everything is so malleable that malleability brightens in understanding, inspiring a lap dance or two. I will never know quite what to say about the waterfall. How it got here. What it’s doing here. How it suddenly emerged into consciousness. But there it is, falling over that edge of rocks, thundering, spraying, dropping to the river below, which is just what happens, thanks to gravity, thanks to space.

Cuff Link

There’s a grandeur in a cuff link. You have to look for it, but it’s there. The sheen of the cuff link coincides with the luster of the violin and suggests a certain decorum. The violin and the cuff link are all about decorum. The syzygy sizzles in zithers. I can see Paris in the distance. Its arrival trembles on the paper. This is called furniture.

There has been a lot of rain lately. The river is flooding its banks. I say this in relation to wood carving, which has its own logic, its own laws and ways of doing things, and whose chips collect at the base of the steps. There is just enough clay in the world to mimic the shipwreck of truth on the banks of experience, but not enough to duplicate the ingenuity of spring. Only yesterday did I see a man walk down the street in a bathrobe carrying a Technicolor headache.

I feel the presence of a certain plaster. My right arm is a proverb. My left arm is an elevator. Together we accomplish farms and juggle hairdryers.

Fossils are treasured for conversation. They hide in postage stamps, attracting stepladders and Mediterranean odysseys. I feel the same way about embroidery as I do about sweatshirts. The Grateful Dead were no ordinary rock group. Their butter pulsed with a better dream than the grommets of gastronomy.

Which is why there’s no guided tour today. I think, instead, I will practice the drums and study concrete. I don’t know why I do the things that I do. Elegance has its own oils. Behavior cries for expansion. The representation of a misunderstanding argues in favor of plumage and space. All misunderstandings are beautiful because they lead to philosophy.

Abstraction comes with its own set of exigencies. Which is why the life of the philodendron is so fat with heaven.

It’s not just the ocean, it’s the general idea of fins. You can see it in the eyes of the fish. They seem always so casually surprised and conscious of little else but their own movement. This is why I’m so attracted to them as metaphors. They’re so natural. They carry the mystery of their life in a milieu of water like words in the milieu of a sentence. The milieu contains them, but not completely. The boundary between sky and water is indeterminate. A school of fish inhabit the dream of movement in surges of unpredictable movement. Whatever the thought the words convey, their theme is never static, but seethes in unending sequence.

Fire sweetens the air with heat. I’ve never met Joan Jett but I imagine she’s quite nice. Why is it always so exciting to meet musicians? Perhaps because they know how to bend space. The strongest songs are sometimes sung by a gentle voice. Beowulf, for instance. There are great delicacies there. One feels the compression of the words in the chaos of the mead hall.

Elsewhere in the world insects, constitutions, and wheelbarrows pulse with fanfare. English priests wander in the fog. Samuel Beckett buys Grendel a beer at the Deux Magots. The rain walks backwards down the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Personally, if I had to make a choice, I’d go for the pumpernickel. As for propellers, it should be obvious: they arouse a love of form.

Dada Budapest

Infinity solicits our ears to assist in the worship of latex. We walk in exhibition of ourselves, comfortable in our structures of sound, living in the full evidence of our fingers, coaxing meaning out of mud and interacting with the sirens as they lure us further into the poem of life. The journey begins with a hot wet kiss and ends with a defiant hoop skirt. The miles in between are long and argumentative but the darkness stirs the blood and the stripes in the center lane are a confection of pigments and synthetic resin. The gravel at the side of the road is more like crockery than fruit, but tastes of science, a multitude of atoms fused into one dominating impression of words and whispers of rain. It is why I must consider the heat of this moment as a flame bundled together to make a cloth. It is obvious that physical science is an abstraction, but to say this and nothing more would be a confession of philosophic failure which I, for one, am not prepared to make. If you think how you fold things you will see what I mean. Abstractions smell of consciousness, especially at these higher elevations, where the wildflowers shout their names. The truck is old but runs like a top. We enter Dada Budapest moistened by paraffin. It isn’t Nebraska. It’s more like navigating a bubbly ear with a beautiful finger. There are feathers in the toolbox, and themes of redemption, which are good for hanging curtains. If I strain to describe my belt I discover a form of geometry crawling over itself in reckless abandon. I’m held together by shoes, like most people, but sound like a piano if someone gets too close to my paddle. Let’s face it, art isn’t always as hospitable as you might think. Have you ever tried buying a bathtub at the Home Depot? How did that enterprise get started, anyway? And when did Dada become so emphatic as to deserve an entire city? This is how I’ve learned to bare myself upon impact. When endurance meets popcorn the result is a stepladder. I’ve been pregnant before, but not with a paragraph. Unfolding it has been surprisingly round, like the dome of a skull reposing on a block of ice. I feel the friction of life during the intuition of screws. This happened in a crustacean, once, and the result was wood. Everything velvet stands erect. I salute the presumption. There is this silk to wear, have you heard of it? It gets hazy when you pull it over your head and then stimulates conversation as it unites with the bed linen. Somebody said that’s a symptom of depression and I opened it and found a horse. I clasped the wind to my breast and crushed a nearby sob with a flick of my gland. Which gland, I’m not saying. Let’s just say it has something to do with propulsion. Who doesn’t like the west coast of Ireland? Is that all you can say? Retire on your own terms. Periodically, I like to sparkle when no one is expecting it, and the hit songs that once made life squirt with stereophonic glee are now all understood as knobs, or Indian paintbrush.

 

 

The Cloud

The cloud is equally mist and motion and shape. The carving skidoodles and this becomes a sentence giving a hypothesis life as a suggestion, that is to say coffee, which is a beverage, which is a tongue of the moment, which is a metaphor, which is a path on the skin. Harmony and eating are also bubbly. There’s no easy definition for night. Gambling does not lead to redemption, no, but it will lead to flames of retaliation. The paragraph rolls by on rails. Symptoms include glue, desire, correlation, and trout. There is more light in a wrinkle than you can imagine if you look closely in a mirror you will find a face of water exhibiting an impersonal glow. I will dote more on glue. I will grant that I have an interior walking among my drugs. It’s by soaring through red the mimes will come to understand us. But if we heave ourselves into abstraction the many lives carved out of the mountain have the flavor of syntax combined with the color of ice cubes, which is a kind of non-color, or ghostly vibration of milk. I don’t sneer at wrestling, I was once a wrestler myself, but I do not think that nailing a noun to a description of henna will result in anything like a philosophy. Anything written down is mentally viable, can be pictured, can be imagined, can be extruded from the mouth at a social gathering and writhe in the air like a deep prodigal thumb or ugly towel. I’m eager to enrich this thought with an insinuation involving bedsprings and rocks. Eyebrows forest the forehead for a reason. Don’t take sideburns lightly. Elvis didn’t, and look what happened to him. High collars, rhinestones, and Vegas. The mind is a funny form of energy, a rodent running a treadwheel, the chatter of rodeo clowns at a winter ski resort. People don’t normally associate revelation with the streets of Chicago, a violent place to be sure, but also a simulacrum, a parallel to hair. The sparks are a gift from John Lennon. It’s time now to search for a little grace at the airport. Nothing melts faster than ice on the wing of a plane readying for takeoff. Music solicits my ears in a dream and penumbra surrounding my buttons acts all Technicolor and hands, like the sympathy of swimming when there is granulation and taxis. That makes trumpets come into mint and jingle in truancy. I can’t say enough about eggnog. I must go now and make some wings to extol the etiquette of opinion.

I'll Be Honest

I’ll be honest, I’m not shy when it comes to getting wet. Sometimes I’m a boat, sometimes I’m the ocean. Writing brings out the punctuation in me. Nutmeg argues the existence of prose. Attachment is a major feature of the human condition and its inevitable counterpart, loss, is implied in the grin of the ogre at the end of the fairy tale and all the rakes have been put back in the garage and leaned against the wall in their proper position. This is why we plant things. Mass gargles space like a delivery truck. Liberty doesn’t depend on ovaries, just childbirth, but let’s not minimize the boil of mosquitoes in that hot Midwestern air.

The mind burns to ash in its cage of bone and makes a perfect bed for thought.

Who doesn’t prefer the purgatory of autumn to the fireworks of summer?

There’s a fatal clarity in the colors of desire. There’s no map for experience, but there are plenty of detours.

For example, if you push the age of a potato to the edge of a clock you can call it a deviation and pump it full of pockets and let it stir among the Jacobins and nothing happens except butter. The poem stands among its sounds insoluble and buggy and remedies the blandishment of granite with perpetual emergencies. I know what it means to be Euclid I once abandoned a sandwich for an incumbency in a brood of consonants. There’s no form of electricity that doesn’t require a lyrical response.

We see the Muse waving to us in the distance. We wonder what is intended. Should we come closer? Wave back? Write something?

Desire tosses its mane. The hills strain to make a point. Muscles explode into walking, feeling, becoming immense and metaphoric. And so we let it all happen. We groan at our chains and invoke the gods.

What gods? Are there any gods out there?

A few. There is the god of the goad, the god of the good, and the god of the gob.

Gobs of god.

Someone asks, but what about morality? Morality is stupendous, I agree, but its roots must be nourished by the tears of clarinets, and there are only so many clarinetists in the world.

It takes a yardstick and a glockenspiel to make a proper emotion. But what’s a proper emotion? Emotions are improper by nature. Nature is inherently improper.

There are only improper emotions, and beer and pretzels.

Gymnastics advance the podiatry of violinists. Everyone needs a stance. Some of us need a stampede.

Iron, on the other hand, is an agency of considerable weight. I don’t know why I mention this, except as an aside, and to make an appeal for the sombrero. Nothing slams louder than the door of an angry woman. All my adaptations to this planet have been slow in the making. There are things I just don’t get. Hence, the appeal of writing. Writing helps provide a semblance of control. But what a joke that is. History teaches us that the duodenum plays a significant role in the development of free will. Exploration is baldly Epicurean. And here is where I fell into the magic of dry cleaning.

We all like to hang upside down and ruminate. I do, at least. If I can find something to support my body I’ll defy gravity and think about ways to avoid thinking.

Thinking at all.

Imagine a ring of bone. Then imagine the hole in the ring of bone. That’s precisely the sentiment that I want to have in my head. But as soon as I get a hole in my head the hole fills up with stuff. And so it begins: micturition.

There are drugs for micturition, but let’s not get into that. This doesn’t become a problem until much later in age when marriage and propellers unite in the jaw of the universe as a form of endless expression. The wind goes on talking and the odors clasp your nose and swing it into burlap. That’s when you know you’re on the verge of something, something vague and lyrical, something like poetry, something like a ring of bone, something with steady parallels and trickles of words describing the flaws in the glass, the voice in the kerosene released at last.

Sleeves of Grass

I shiver to every breeze and to floating charcoal. Nobody’s smell the elbow slams is grease. I’m elbows. The water fusses over bohemia on the door. The apple tree blooms over rattles, a world like snow. I lament the loss of introspection beneath a monument to industry. We age in participles like a dream of shells, the wonder of it green, so green that to elevate windows is a help to consider fog and angels. I have a drawing of a coin inscribed with the formula for Vicodin. Write your name below and I will send you a description of fog. It will be garnished with radar and taste like a chair. I’m extending my crowd to a stove. This means I’m feeling sanguine and my words are filled with heat. There are trousers in the closet and the morning has been folded by hospital hermits. The shadows of Paris produce electricity. There are coordinates beside the pepper. It doesn’t help to argue with a worry. The worry will win. Just walk away. And take your worry with you. I’m going on a tour of Alabama. I experience science as a serendipitous snake inside the parenthesis of a dead sentence. The sentence died because nobody read it. It came alive when it was pumped with the details of a grasshopper and resurrected in reading. Somebody read it. It must've been read. I can hear it groan under the weight of its own existence as it strains to make itself understood. It moves now, word by word, remembering and thinking. It plunges into its own diversions. This is how we know that the savor of mayonnaise incarnates the tangle of the mind. This is how we know that there even is a tangle of the mind. This is how the silk of listening necessitates thought. This is how consideration becomes a waterfall and dreaming walks among these words in a gown of opacity. Philosophy joins me in swallowing reality. Each time that I shave or iron a shirt I discover a sack of helium in my head falling like snow on a river. The river is a gift of variation illumined by forty-two light bulbs in a whipped cream cartoon. It keeps the lips moving. I fold what I need to fold and put the rest in storage. I find consciousness has the power to bubble when there's enough cement around to build a geometry of wheels and traffic cones. Life is often sticky with play. Suppose gold. Dollop monstrosity. There’s a hint of introversion in all of us. This may be of some use on a picnic. Physiology occurs when eating is happening. Tuna is nothing like cactus. But I do like swimming. There is the phenomenon of pulling a paper sun to translate grass. The grass is interwoven with air. It makes sense to forge a relationship with the things of earth. I’m gambling on the planet to dote on its own circumlocution. There are some pains that can be a little amusing at times, especially when the currents move toward chiaroscuro in the evening.

Weather Report

The weather hurries to validate Euclid. And because it’s autumn, we have all agreed to the counsel of garlic. The Cubism of Picasso, Braque and Léger completed what Cézanne had begun. This helps explain why Picasso, Léger and Braque were able to profit from their sensations and analyze every part of every motif into its smallest negotiable plane, just like the weather. Just like Cézanne. My palette sizzles with birds and chisels. I feel needles of turpentine. I thirst for rivets. These things are difficult to explain. Sensations, in general, are hard to explain. Nerves are words without syllable or sound. The brain is a great auditorium where the litter of dreams echo with the singing of little girls. I would have to crawl under your skin to feel what you feel. But would your sensations continue to be your sensations or would they then become my sensations? Maybe we should just go see a movie.

I like being connected. If anyone is stabbed during a performance the effect is remarkable. I’m referring, of course, to mind and matter. “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.” We are often unified in disagreement. This should tell you something. This morning my horse abandoned me for a bikini filled with four hundred breasts. I went to the airport to search for its source. All I found was the fourth dimension and a demure gorilla colonizing an asymmetrical mood. I find it intriguing that the shine of an amoeba can reverse the opinion of a little smallpox.

Singing permits the personalization of pain. Doesn’t it? Is that what you wanted to know? I forget. Apart from that, which gives you the greatest pleasure, nipples or bones?

You’re welcome to clean the apartment if you want. I get a little sweaty around clay and must often suppress the urge to crawl and reproduce. Openly exposed genitalia make people uncomfortable. They get the wrong idea. But you have to admit there’s something inherently lyrical about skin, the way it wrinkles, its ingenuous warmth  and enveloping anticipation. You don’t often find that kind of sincerity in the brain. That’s an entirely different organ with an entirely different dominion. It may explain why I smell pumpernickel and apples every time I sit down to exalt the history of denim.

The oak tree stands in the autumn afternoon enduring and solid while the clouds go riding by on the sexual air swollen and incandescent in hedonistic rapport with a streetcar named Agog.

Doorknobs, it’s true, are gripping. But there exist, as always, anomalies, and not all doorknobs open doors. Sometimes they exist plainly to fascinate the eyes with saleswomen. You can sense it in Mallarmé. Not all the swans are white. Sometimes they assume the color of forceps, while others are adorned in the colors of the spinal cord.

If you’d like to know more about Cubism, a trail of madder red leads to the Bateau-Lavoir.

When things go wrong, a mockingbird is better than a glove. Butterflies embody the souls of the dead. Everybody knows that. But how many people does it take to pull the wool over the head of a loud parameter? And what exactly is a parameter? Is a parameter a perimeter? Or is it more like an ablative with a backyard patio?

I respect the toss of the mouth. And I like the way the tide pool speaks to the orchestra about the fable of the banished hypotenuse. Charles Ives stood riveted by the use of stucco. We stayed for the cherries although their shadows had already been put in storage. And one of the violins crawled out of itself to find a more satisfying apotheosis in absinthe.

Yes, I do have intestines. They sound like convolutions of golden football.

Nothingness wrinkles in the hills, but that sounds different. That sounds processional, like the stars.

Remember Euclid? He sounds like that too.

Anytime there is a structure around I can smell it. For example, the indicative smells like a calliope. Sex is a burning smell. There are those who say that sex doesn’t have a structure, that it’s all impulse and instinct and messy bedsheets, but this isn’t necessarily the case. One might also consider the bedsprings, the placing of the telephone, and the hang of the curtains. Some like Brahms. Some prefer the Rolling Stones. Brahm’s clarinet quintet in B minor can be effectively performed underwater, but it will not smell like an opportunity, if that’s what you’re hoping for. Opportunities don’t have smells. They just strut around in peacock feathers auditioning for chins.

There’s a reason that air was invented. Without air, what would the weather do? All those hurricanes and typhoons would go to waste. All those troubles, all those dances. All those nouns soaked in faith.

Faith and Hollywood.

Ghosts.

Nouns.

Coils.

The tension inherent in cloth. The stroll of a cat across a keyboard. The masks people wear when the engines sputter and the race is about to begin. Everyone gazing south, where a bank of clouds moves in, hideous and veined with expectation.

 

Bruegel Bone

Gravity thickens with mass just as words do

When cotton is to cloth what squeezing is

A recruitment thickening with meat

That sells for a dollar at the local emotion

Spirit and color walking in bone. There

Is a power within us that will chirp its way

To Scotland with a drug on its shoulder

All dreamy and soft. You can hear it

In the rain as it strains to make itself

Multifarious like Ted Berrigan’s sonnets

The turmoil is in the house, which is lousy

With mushrooms and haggis. Surely

An axle is as wet as its veins. It was all sidewalks

Then breaking and imagery in the wind

Thudding through the trees like a theory

Mutating into thought. I just am. I’m

Serious as candy. The reason for aging is wrinkles

And unresolved emotional issues. I also have

A rapier. This is for remembering and thinking

I like puddles not puzzles. I like the idea

Of playing a harmonica more than actually

Playing a harmonica. This is good for me, good

For you. Before the journey ends I just want

To kiss you all over and say what a joy it has been

To ride through the laundromat on a comet

Aching and romantic, a saga of unfocussed rage

Enough, at least, to inspire a pharmaceutical

The sunlight likes you too you know you should

Go on a pretty migration through space

Talking about snow and the odor of elephants

There is a mythology of absorption in the way

It is written with a garden hose I feel all thick

And bubbly now and intend to cause art. This is how

Consciousness bounces around. We put a little

Thought into it and as soon as the enamel is shaped

Like a knock at the door, there’s a quiet solemn group

Of hunters returning in the snow

A Viking Wrinkles

A Viking wrinkles

In black boots and steepness

Is implicit in the stitches

Of a woman squeezing a sponge

I like butter it’s true it improves

Everything especially scrambled eggs

Gaudy as the misunderstanding

Of coffee. When did you ever

Completely understand this beverage?

Tea has a delicacy that doesn’t fit

The rage of the morning and its awkwardness

Rubbing against the hair of the leg

With all the muscle it can muster

I’m throwing an idea at you let me know

When it arrives. I’m learning how to feel

My arms as I hold a stack of books

We answer the call of our skin this way

Circle ourselves with the colors

Of consciousness and take care of the personality

In its interactions with the world. My forehead

Glitters with violins when the wind blows through it

Poetry is the mushroom growing beside the rock

Is this the right spoon for this emotion? Or should I use

A knife? Dive into books. Slither through the words

They mean what you want them to mean, so work them

Into agglutination. This is what ganglions are for

We initiate ourselves in cocoons, enter them as

Ideas and come out as airplanes. Don’t sneer

At ears. I tell this to all my friends

I seek depth in understanding. And drink coffee

In the light of my anarchy. I want to be social

But when I’m in conference with a ghost

I just want to dawdle at the table until the waitress

Brings me more coffee. Honey it’s the same

As the spaces between the bars that keep

The tiger caged and the words are splendid

When the nerves release them

Here I Am Stirring the Senses

Here I am stirring the senses

And listening to the Rolling Stones

As they once existed in England

Now you always say that you want to be free

But you’ll come running back to me

Coiled into introversion the way I found you

There’s an engine beside the syntax

Of a river causing it to arrange itself

In funny currents and giants of garlic and thorn

Scattering itself into oars where the mockingbird

Sings and the threads are heavenly. Equilibrium

Feels good. Doesn’t it? Balance yourself

On a line of poetry and consider the light

Of the candle. We only bring them out when

The wind tears through the shitty infrastructure

Of this city and causes a power outage. Things

Get romantic quickly. Out come the candles

And quills and the skin itches with all the toxins

Inside the body that want to come out and express

Themselves as ideas. Well, what’s an idea? Can you

Tell me? When the elevator arrives and the door

Opens do you sometimes expect to see angels

Discussing Cubism? Use your biology to top

The similarity of violins. There’s got to be strings

In this world or the music will just hang

In the air like a universe. The weight of this

Emotion is anonymous and bubbles

As I crawl across the floor looking for my impact

On society. I know it’s here someplace

I know a good magician when I see one

Saw a woman in half and accelerate the noise

Of my skin. Syntax squeezes the water as it glides

Over my head like a big idea of spectacular perspective

And all I can do is offer you a sonnet giving birth

To an evergreen shaking in the wind like a garage

That later turns gray in the mind and real

As the imagery of heaven on a coin of jelly

Chuck Berry's Sideburns

Dissonance heaves its guts

Provides us with delectation

What a strange world this is

In which everything dies

Of envy and desire. What I need

Is to despair of ever finding an answer

And that will be the answer

The knife does not exist

Without an edge. Sometimes I think

I will and sometimes I think I won’t

This is why I prefer to go dark

And slow and grow wings out of my

Shoulder blades. I don’t expect

To go around sullen all the time

We older folks have to show the young

How to swerve into the landscape

Get off the main road and stand

On the stars. If a heat pierces your heart

Use it to cook an affection

Fall in love with cement

You may not use arithmetic

To chatter with poetry but the poetry

Will get you one way or another

Jump into a tuna Joan Baez in a T-shirt

There’s blood in your veins

Stitched together by ghosts

Ice cubes postulate the light of eternity

In tiny bubbles that sparkle

This is all mentally viable if you

Exasperate the logic of time

With the speedometer of the mouth

This is called concentration

It is how you will feel when you’re naked

In a beautiful raw umber with the density

Of Chuck Berry’s sideburns and your love

Is great and the morning shines and the nerves

Burn for a music to feed that heat 

Tell Me What It's LIke

Tell me what it’s like

To slap a Byzantine insistence

Into definition. You know? So that

I can understand it. The thrust

Of the alligator into the river

Is nothing less than a parable

Of itself looking for dinner

But what I meant to say is acoustical

Like the pulse of a violet sky

Dripping from my brain. The hand

Is evidence of fingers, but the squeeze

Of my arms around you is meant

To convince you that I like you

A lot and if I see a bug play a concertina

I will tell you about it with bells

And innuendo. I will suckle the light

From a headlight and make love to you

While gravity thickens around us

In prophecy and the world spins

Into Wednesday which is my favorite

Day of the week except for Thursday

Friday and Saturday. Monday is damaged

By walking around on Sunday

Waiting to happen. And Sunday

Is obviously unconcerned. Once

I heard a pharmaceutical occur

To my body and fill my mind

With abstraction. It made me want

To write you a letter and hang

Upside down. Someday I hope

To fill a kiss with your lips

Entangled in a thousand themes

Of reckless abandon. Watch me sway

With the wind. I like to float around

In my head like a world but does it

Have a jaw of gold? No but it squirts fog

Like a metaphor assembled for winter

Little Love Valves

I’ve had it with folding laundry. I’d rather seduce a push-up. Last night I saw Guillaume Apollinaire attack a wall and leave it trembling with closets. This inspired me. Even the drummers were nervous. But the drums, the drums were colossal. They gnashed at the air with sticks. Insights marched into representations of envy. We viewed the world differently. Everything seemed, suddenly, to exhale parentheses. Quiet intervals of private debauchery. Yodeling is now all the rage. This is how writing happens. A novel crawls into itself and percolates improbability. The density is large and red. Volume and area are frequented by pronouns. The pronouns behave irresponsibly and so bring about a state of crisis groaning with gasoline. Sparkling accommodates the cuticles of a river. Chronology collapses on itself. The narrative moves cautiously, slowly, like a high-wire funambulist crossing an abyss in a strong wind. For some reason this makes me think of sandpaper. The smell of a mahogany bar after spending an entire day rubbing it with sandpaper.

Picasso, for example, compensated for his lack of tactile feeling by drawing in air. That is, by constructing instead of modeling or yodeling.

The term “constructed” is how the Cubists were able to repair the damage done by the Impressionists.

And this is how I came to discover the certitude of mass in Puerto Rico. Hippies chewing water, magnolia leaves enveloping the attention of a Pomeranian.

You think I’m kidding? I’m not. Imagine a family of four grown men, one in bed with a sore throat, one dressed as an astronaut, one repeatedly tossing a baseball into a catcher’s mitt, and one with smallpox scars rehearsing for Hamlet. Life is seldom simple, and misleading evidence for William Huggins’s theory of nebulae being composed of luminous gas obscure our view of other galaxies. Banish Falstaff, but do not banish space.

I like propellers too much not to consider them as somehow allegorical.

Power, on the other hand, is essentially osteopathic. All the crustaceans scatter when I slam the door. I will, therefore, expand my activities to include sculpture and photosynthesis.

Everything changes when I choose to see the world in chiaroscuro. The immediate environment assumes an air of pagan urgency. I can embody an airport and dive for ancient Phoenician sweaters. I have a wild green tie that gallops across my chest like an expressway and a convocation of buttons I affectionately call my “little love valves.” None of this proves the existence of salt, but merits careful attention with a lemon-squeezer. The sky falls to the ground and breaks into a thousand knobs of luminous falsetto. What can go wrong?

I will admit that I prefer cellophane to aluminum foil. There’s a certain sorcery in the insistence of rain that speaks to my affinity for afterthought. Afterthought is vastly superior to forethought because Shelley’s Mont-Blanc creates an image of sublimity that continually hypostatizes an eternity of human consciousness. Forethought only reminds us to buy some laundry detergent.

For example, I can endure a parody of mathematics if it pulses with envy. Give me a shovel and I will dig for substitutes. This is how we come to discover that empire is soaked in ovals. And yes, I believe that the world is a fingerprint. How else can you explain the bounciness of pronouns, or the velvet underlining of a waterfall?

The map, they say, is not the territory. I get it. But isn’t it all a matter of corduroy and glue? Mountains exalt the twist of the highway. But the sugar puzzles our tongues with the candor of its sweetness, the multiplicity of its grains, the sensations exploding into symposiums of spectral congeniality the way elves do when they bounce through infinity enlivening the temperature of hindsight or get serious and determined and hammer chimerical ores out of hermetic Norwegian mines or get impromptu and wayward and descend booming furious rivers, drunk and exuberant, wild seething spumescences of locomotive actuation pushed hot and obvious into the sounds of Jack Kerouac’s teletype. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Words on a train. Acoustical, desperate, and strange.

 

 

Ghostly Horizon

There is a silk to listening. It’s a fine sensation. Words glide over the ears. Enter them sweetly in mild conversation. We live in a world of sensation. Snow and paper. Words pressed into paper with a pen. Light presses the face in August. Desires swarm in crisis like a circus. Acrobats catching one another. Horses riding sawdust plumed and muscular. Time thickens into raspberries, blackberries, textures crowded with shapes. There are contraptions available for space, rockets and cars. My personal space is filled with engines of personal prayer. I like to gather all the words I can find in the air and let them fall on your head. Can you feel them? Trickling down like the meat of an egg. Listen to the vowels of night. Listen to them seep into consonants and become delicate things, divine things, paraphernalia, diagrams, reality and its climates, its obstetrics and eyebrows, hunger and turnstiles. Let’s call it a milieu of bone. Of blood. Of sounds fossilized in abstraction. Fingers in a fist of ceremony. Cries of secretion. Intestines on a ceiling. The nightmare that is a job. That crushing boredom endured for money. Ok. Let’s not get to deep into politics. Do birds think of their feathers as equipment? I doubt it. Must be a terrific sensation to lift oneself into the air by flapping wings. Wonder how it feels if the joints get sore. Those old crows especially. The ones that look back at you with jaded eyes. Yes, I’m old. But I can still fly. Watch this. Flap, flap, flap. And he’s gone. But look: the world is secure in its grandeur. The thrashing of science, endless tubes and experiments, labyrinths and tests, dynasties of empirical thought grappling with the vertigo of eternity. Consciousness is exhausting. That’s why we have drugs. And food. Let’s take food: is food a drug? I feel a little addicted to eating. Put me anywhere near chocolate and I’m in serious trouble. Conflicted or fat. One of the two. Which is why I haven’t been to Scotland yet. It’s not the chocolate. It’s the whiskey. I know I’d feel compelled to go on tour drinking everything in sight. Again, it’s worth repeating, consciousness is exhausting. Shoving it onto paper is amusing sometimes. When experience gets organized into language it seems, I don’t know, like spatulas hanging in a kitchen. Velvet and lingerie. German is ponderous, isn’t it? That’s a heavy language. Not like French. French is nimble and light. More like water. It flows. Meanders. Reflects. Glitters back at the sun with hallucinatory jewels. Huge corridors filled with mirrors. Cultured pearls. I like it when the flowers agree to amuse us with their elegance and embroidery. The words traveling through my nerves are swollen, engorged with meaning and passion. I’m almost afraid to open my mouth and let them out. Certain veins of thought offer tricky diversions. I chip at the bas-relief of my pullulation and go wild. I will not impose this weight on you. Let’s just lean back and enjoy the autumn. Cook some noodles and watch them swirl. Just like words. Listen: the water is boiling. I can say anything now. I won’t pull back. I’ll dive right in. Honor these abstractions with toil. Montmartre and metaphysics. Construct a morning with the blood in my veins and stitch it to some ghostly horizon.

Feral Words

The signs employed in propositions are called rudders. They steer the mind, which would otherwise drift aimlessly, as it might do in an airport, or law office.

There are medications available for ataraxia, eudaimonia, euthymia, and upekkhā. The key word is for. These are medications in support of euphoric solutions to the nettles and thorns of life and appear in a variety of forms: ecstasy, codeine, dithyramb, dada. 

Most of my medication has a coefficient similar to Holland, which is why I’ve chosen to go through life explaining facelifts to the faithful and plunge my fingers into strange anatomies. Sometimes I grip the light in my hands dreaming of the heraldry of stars. But most of the time I stand around trembling like a soy bean. The mazurka deepens my appreciation of milk. I feel perforated and evident.

Happily there is a farm where we can dig for potatoes and become real men. I have a map of China and can run circles around a rusty sabbatical. Even the railroad flirts with abstraction from time to time. When the storm arrives we can elope. I’ve fallen in love with a clock. It’s a broken clock, but what does that matter? Time is an illusion. Let the local architecture thunder in solemn approval. There’s more to sketching a bewildered psychoanalysis than embarrassing a glove compartment with last minute propositions.

I search for power in the folds of a hog. Later I ruminate on the quantity of sweat this produces and lean over the balcony to study the crowd. A flock of words raises the highway from a delirious libido and puts it into a lithograph. The question is, whose words? Are these feral words? Are these the words of an aleatory abstraction or do they belong to a rogue arousal?

Let us suppose that the spine is a spiral staircase and that the lumber destined for paradise is pure dogma. Does this mean that states can be described but not named?

Yes.

I get the measles whenever I think about woodbine. You don’t know how sensitive I am. Pretty women torture me with hope. Yesterday I had my stitches removed. The sublime bends my blood into a speedboat. I’ve grown feathers. Meanwhile the Druids forage for old Beatles records. I stroll the waterfront enveloped in a solemn socialism. Even the gargoyles complement my exquisite grumpiness.

It is said, in these regions, that the structures of propositions stand to one another in internal relations. I have no reason to doubt this. Life scratches itself whenever it’s near a railroad. I say life as if it were my next door neighbor. Life is very close to me. I think, in many ways, that it is life that causes my fingers to itch and burn whenever I hold a proposition in my cupped hands and feel its little heart beat with controversy.

The world is the whole world. There is nowhere else to go. If Robert De Niro doesn’t make you feel better, I don’t know what to say. You might try licorice.

 

 

The Sentence as a Form of Crochet

What else can I do with this abstract ice, this jingle of bells, but be silent and enjoy it? A tall pink tower sparkles below these words. Whispers of cumbersome chronology help grease the gears of the elevator. I sometimes imagine the dead are trying to pull us into their realm. Could it be that Rome is even more wonderfully imperfect than at first imagined? I can feel something hopping around in my heart. Snakes and rapiers are more like axioms than gumdrops. But what is it that awakens the syllables of a warm farm crowded with shapes as the afternoon begins to lift itself into the air and a totem of vowels chatters its story of frogs and whales? Is it a big man doing delicate things, or a shiny Pythagorean pain? There is a meaning that seeps through these words and it would explain everything if I could only find it. I do know I prefer the sheets tucked in at the end of the bed but that doesn’t help explain the powers that are invisible to us, the splashes of divinity sweeping over our oars. Form is the beginning of consciousness. Touch is optional. Gnawing is acoustical. Conquest is rudimentary. The vast unfolding of a consummate ache renders one’s fingers more personal, more nimble of themselves as soon as one realizes that that inner pain, that inner hunger is riding a train through Texas. I’m totally into dumbbells. If my tongue is encumbered by a rabbit I accommodate its being and wrestle my incentives to the ground. I get up. I look around. And if the sun is still there I cheer the light and approve the playground slide. Raw essential being urges conference with a rhinoceros. I create holes in the air to escape from war. This causes art and stimulation. Darkness dangles like bats in a mouth of cabbage. I call this necromancy. But it doesn’t work. No dead people appear. Just Bob Dylan on a horse. Tinfoil is emotional. I feel its attractions whenever I smell a catalogue rotting in somebody’s garage. Maybe it’s best to leave the dead alone. I’ll be joining them one day, but for the meanwhile I’ll continue my cartwheels and sexy indiscriminate perceptions of singing. I saw Finland once, in a dream, which is the true geographic location of Finland. I saw the face of its deliverance, and huge fuzzy eyebrows on the faces of the men, and women so flashy and beautiful that my eyes unraveled in gold. It’s then that I realized that the universe is bigger than I initially thought and may be applied to the principles of the accordion, which goes in and out as one squeezes it, producing melodies and dilations of spirit. I can secrete anything I want. Ramification is something else. For that, we’ll need an engine and a large comfortable armchair. It’s time that we included our elbows in something. One can accomplish miracles in bas-relief. Opera stirs the senses. It’s here that we begin to feel a heavy fire in the growling air and let the sidewalk do its thing, just lay itself out in all that concrete, allowing us to abandon our oars and luxuriate in the sweetness of incantation.

On Getting Old

Existence grows in weight as one ages. It’s as if lived phenomena accumulated like alluvial deposits in a river and cemented into lithological regrets. Disillusionments, terminations, humiliations, hallucinations, chagrins, manias, aversions, divisions, conflicts, chaos, rocks.

Wrinkles don’t help. Nor does arthritis. Drugs, sometimes. Nevertheless, marvels continue: snow, electricity, the universe.

One discovers a subversive elegance in some of the uglier aspects of life. Beauty belongs to the young. Old age finds consolation in being less subject to the tyrannies of beauty. By the time one has reached one's sixties, one has experienced enough loss, mortality, sickness, treachery, duplicity, and disappointment to realize what a true comedy human existence can be, albeit not a particularly funny one.

I watched a video on YouTube of Willie Nelson in 1962 sing “Crazy” to a television audience and marveled at how much his appearance has changed. In 1962 he was 29, a young man on the threshold of maturity. His hair was lush and red and impeccably combed. He looked like a cross between Liberace and Kirk Douglas. Now in his eighties, he is more fully himself. His face is weathered and craggy and his hair, which is still lush and red but tinged with gray, spills over his shoulders. He looks like an outlaw of the old weird American west. He’s a perfect example of how the losses that come with the passage of time become fruitions, chrysalis and increase. The richest sounds come from a battered guitar. And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

I have often heard people in their sixties and seventies remark that they feel the same as when they were eighteen. I can understand that. At 68, I feel that way myself. I like the same music and have the same tendencies toward wild, crazy behavior. I also know what the repercussions of that behavior feel like and are much harder to bear in old age. I remember hangovers in my forties that felt like warmed over death. I also know that when I enter a room the heads of young ladies don’t turn to look fetchingly upon my wrinkled skull, the one with the little hairs growing out of my ears. I didn’t have an enlarged prostate at age 18, which causes me to hold up lines to the urinal in the men’s room, nor a paunch or big fuzzy eyebrows or liver spots. My future at 18 offered a grand panorama of options and possibilities. At 68, I’m invited to look over cremation and burial opportunities.

So no, life at 68 doesn’t feel quite the same as it did at 18. Although, occasionally, it does. And when I see Mick Jagger leaping about on a stage in his seventies with greater energy and nimbleness than he did in his early twenties, I don’t know what to think. Is he just making it look that way, or is it possible that in some fashion we actually can grow younger as we get older? Existence does feel heavier. But it also feels much more mortal and temporary, and that extra sense of ephemerality does something to the spirit, inflates it with hot, euphoric glee.

An Elevator Door Opens

An elevator door opens. Out steps an abstraction dressed in handsprings. What this means is sensation, keen sensation, exquisite sensation, the language of fish and chips and dreams trickling puddles of reflection on Sunday mornings. The delicate noises of Cézanne’s marvelous life.

Please somebody help me. I’m drowning in ovations. Or are they evasions? What I meant to say is that the salt in a Martian’s ear is inherently lyrical. But I don’t think you need me to tell you that. What was it you needed me for? Would you like me to tell you about pain? Pain is an indecent confusion that apparels us in lightning in the ancient gardens of the mind.

What a strange smell. Is that you? When one’s nerves are birds the world begins spinning. And smelling. You know that smell when you open a can of tuna? That’s the smell. It reminds me of fish and death and the merciless ambling of a black conviction spread by the paragraph of a dark, slow voice producing cleavage and oysters in a cocktail lounge somewhere in Alabama.

What’s your favorite emotion? Mine is ripping the sky apart and standing on a star outside of time.

It is the job of the house to mingle itself with cracks.

My understanding of Seattle has expanded to include Tangiers. This makes everything vertiginous and wide. I’ve never been overly fond of horizontality. There are horses in me that want the wide open spaces of a piece of paper. Anguish is just the flip side of oblivion. There’s a certain ooze that confirms this, and a stranger arriving in town whose eyes are evocations of pink. With a little spit and varnish he can be made to look like anybody, even Carl Sandburg.

It is the destiny of puppets to dangle from strings and climax in diphthongs. This is how I managed to arrive in Cincinnati just in time to rupture a scruple. I got tangled in my strings but when I discovered autonomy available in the G minor of a violin sonata by Franz Schubert I took full advantage and tripped lightly into an elevator that took me all the way to Point Hope, Alaska.

If all else fails, you can always rely on circumlocution. Some people call it bullshit. Me, I like to think of it as a random migration of thought trembling under a vast spectrum of improbability.

This is where the adjectives come in: gluttonous, exquisite, revitalizing, ebullient, jovial, carefree, playful, buoyant, and drastic. Everything The House of Destiny should be: open, aberrant, original, eccentric, bottomless, topless, immeasurable, peculiar, and odd.