Liftoff at the Court of Versailles

The balloon was a 37,500 cubic feet sphere of sky-blue taffeta held together by 18,000 buttons, coated with a varnish of alum and decorated with flourishes of gold and the signs of the zodiac. The crew consisted of a sheep, a rooster, and a duck. They were placed in a small wicker basket attached to the balloon by cords of hemp. Each time one of them was placed in the basket, they promptly jumped back out, barely missing the open pit in which the fire crackled. Some grass, seeds, and worms were deposited in the basket which ultimately persuaded the crew to remain put.

King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette pinched their noses to block the stench of smoke, a mephitic blend of burning wool, fetid hay, and old shoes. It was assumed that the smellier the smoke, the more buoyant the craft.

It was a warm September day. Hundreds of people gathered about the great lawn of Versailles.

The fire crackled, the duck quacked, the rooster pecked at a worm. The sheep let out a long vibrant bah as the balloon rose higher and began to drift over the palace.

Heads tilted back. Voices murmured.

Sacre bleu! exclaimed Marie Antoinette.

The flight lasted approximately eight minutes, covered two miles, and obtained an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

The basket hung still as the balloon floated weirdly and majestically over the topiary of Versailles and thence into the rougher countryside, diminishing in size as it began a slow descent and landed at the carrefour Maréchal in the bois de Vaucresson. The sphere drooped like a wounded celestial body as the wicker basket glided over tremors of green grass and came to a stop.

It was to be expected that the duck, rooster and sheep would be transformed for better or worse after attaining such height, but they appeared quite normal when the first people gazed into the wicker basket. The duck quacked, the rooster crowed, the sheep baaad. The animals were fine.

What were the thoughts that the crowd took home with them that day? The mind has a light that delights to dance on its own suppositions. For this is the day that flight became possible, and free will shined louder in the vineyards, whose bounty, it was said, exceeded all records that year. 

Incidents of Rubber

I lived in a garage in 1967

And then I moved to a bus

This is what poets do

They build parenthetical habitations

For their beads & spatulas

Their wonderful antagonisms

Their meaningful babble

Their velvet & lingerie

What is the harm in writing a poem

What is the harm in pursuing a life

Of writing poetry? It is simply this:

When we feel a rapier

Of purposeful

Purposelessness run through our guts

We know we’re on to something

Lethal. If you’re a poet who knows plumbing

Or law you will find acceptance

And the resistance of a metal

To denting. The dime shines

That is romantically awkward

Like a profession

When the abstractions become personal

And form is more than its content

It’s a consistency that cuts across the continent

Without leaving a trail of tears to secure

The idea of rope which is partially frayed  

Nor is it consummate like a stepladder

But acoustical like a railroad

Moving toward the sun

Of a particular feeling

Concerning Argentina. Vividness

Has a price. If the friction of life

Propels enough feeling that the water

Churns and the blood summons a purge

Then please join me in swallowing reality

And we will hum our favorite song of thread

Sewing our voices together in rhapsodies

Of something instead of nothing

I need a good camel

To the get to the end of the next sentence

And murder distance with a little velocity

Here is where the proverbs grow

In poverty & hardship & structures like oars

Bring us to the shore for a quick meal

And because the narrative necessitates a sag

In the bulk of time I will open a box

In the air & let the sounds find mouths

To say them, sing them, and otherwise snap

Into incidents of rubber 

 

 

Elevator to the Angels

I opened the closet door and there stood Eugène Ionesco lost among our clothes. I removed my coat and gave it to him and he kindly hung it up. Thank you, I said. Don’t mention it, he said. He exited the closet and sneezed and remarked on the art of hanging clothes, how it is haunted by so many prospects, so many hooks, and lends a certain tartness to life, à la the humble martini olive. Precisely, I said. This is the daily ceremony I look forward to every day, that and the glory of continuing my life as a Buffalo Bill impersonator, while I employ the arabesques of words to incarnate the tangle of the mind, and set forth on the prairie in search of stethoscopes and quail. So you write then as well, he asked. I answered humbly that I did. When water is vertical it becomes a waterfall, he said. Yes, I’ve noticed the same phenomenon, I answered. But what happens when we fall through ourselves into sleep? We fall into other worlds, he said. And these worlds are sometimes our salvation. How so, I asked. It is in dreaming that our narratives turn brisk and ultramarine and that our authentic selves leap into postulations of light and buy tickets to Paris. I’m frequently impelled by shoes, I said. But in my dreams, my shoes behave badly. They become prepositions and I can feel their leather creak with strange, metaphysical maps, notions of up and down that lose their meaning entirely, and I can go anywhere I want, which frequently entails flying. The interior of my skull is seized by a shiny, Pythagorean lust, and I need a camel to get across the desert, away from the chains of my brain, which smell of algorithms and creosote. When this happens I awake feeling clever and unconstrained, and this might last for a full twenty minutes, or until I get dressed. Once I am encompassed in my clothes again, the dream dissolves in a pink cloud of divinity. I make breakfast and prepare for the frictions of the world, which require structure and concentration. The table causes itself to press up to my hands and the infinite camaraderie of furniture become fugues of prophecy. I hurry to write descriptions of the greenhouse and experiences of hope and percolation that thicken into invention and understanding. I looked to see what my interlocutor would have to say of this, but he had gone. I checked in the closet. He wasn’t there. But sometime later as I prepared to go pick my wife up at work, an arm emerged from somewhere in the depths of the closet and handed me a soft, heavy coagulation of wool whose buttons of pearl and ivory smelled of accommodation, and whose sleeves accepted my arms like a meditation in silk. Thank you, I said. You’re welcome, came a voice from within the dark. Remember: you’re more than a coat, better than a shirt. Inside your clothes you’re naked. And that, my friend, is an elevator to the angels.

 

These Words

These words are dripping Delaware and these words are eating your eyes. These words are unpredictable and these words are clouds on Mars. These words are vomiting one another and these words are bouncing around in a palace of salt. These words have been harvested from the edge of night and these words smell of rum. These words are sticky and these words are cradled in philosophy. These words have one large blood red eye and these words have rails for the locomotive that is your blood. Blood is a word and so is locomotive. I’m looking for a good radio in which to put these words and golf my way through Switzerland drooling language like a locomotive full of blood. These words are grease marks and these words are looking for something to do. These words are vertical and these words are plunged in thought like a brass bell in a courtroom. These words are delicate as calculus and these words are twinkling in savory misunderstanding. I have harnessed some goldfish to these words as the Notre Dame walks through this paragraph plunged in verbal apprehension of itself. There is a headlight on these words and an ecstasy on Jim Morrison’s blue bus, which is eternal and photogenic, like a secretion. When I think about words I use words to think about words. These are those words. And when the words go their own way I tend to follow. I’m happy and lavender and follow them to the end of the world where proximity is an approximation and the planet rolls through its diversions, purposeless and prodigal as a dragon of dreadful lucidity spreads her gorgeous banjo wings and the empire of space carries a large red mouth in a small green jar.

Three-Way Bulb

I like math even though I suck at it

My arms promote the use of hands

As a warm climate climbs into me

And makes itself at home

I’m haunted by electricity

I don’t understand volts

Or amps but I do understand

Plugs and outlets

I speak with the pungency of fire

Don’t let me burn you

With the soft murmur of fruit

I’m only forming ideas

And ideas of form

A whisper of silver sewn into black

Like an insect crawling to the end

Of a branch and slamming the door

On my face. There are cinnamon twists

In the closet help yourself

No one else will

After the fog lifts it begins to snow

Quarks gurgle the density of experience

Can you hear it

It sounds like popcorn

In the fourth dimension

I wear the headdress of my nation

Which is an exaltation of larks

Coffee enlarges my consciousness

So that it no longer fits my head

I have to write it down

The luxury of pronouns allows this to happen

In the same way that delicate brushwork

Will tickle a jellyfish

How can I explain this paradigm

While I walk backward

With my eyes on stalks

Singing of ancient kings

If only to arrive at some form of conclusion

A sweeping generalization

So convincing that it may be mistaken

For a shirt. I withdraw into olives

And write a book of diamonds

Do not tease the tiger

Or you will be eaten

By remorse and these words

Are hungry for your full attention

I live in a country of endless war

Until we arrive at the border of death

And shavings of Parmesan cheese

Remind us of the good things in life

And the not so good things

Such as weeding & doing the dishes

I work in an olfactory

Membrane making smells

Appropriate to the human condition

I bring a cactus close to my face

And get to know it

Let this moment

Wrap around you like a stranger

Peaked roofs & a timbered façade

A singing nipple

And a white gazebo

Be careful I bruise easily

And this is my backyard

Gardens that flex their muscle

With artificial eczema

It is the turf of a northern climate

And these are the jottings of an old man

Examining his youth

Of lust & corruption

Like that of France

At the beginning of the Revolution

That are now just bits of truth

Contorted like pretzels

In the open light
Of a three-way bulb

 

 

Banging on a Drum

How do you do I’m a poem

I jingle when I walk

And sweat calliopes of salt

As the metaphors begin to boil

And the words crash into one another

Describing sand. There is a club for this

And a punch to the belly

We live in an age of nincompoops

The mouth pleads for an amiable nose

And gets a sunrise instead

But that’s ok I like the feeling of light

Falling on a punctuation of hills

As the great engine of Bach

Makes the gears and wheels move

The peremptory provocations of age

Permit me to say things

Behind the garage

They say time is money

I say time is a sequined dragon

In a milieu of hallucination

Called language

An apparition washes over me

Like a spot of grease

Redolent of beautiful gloom

Sir John Falstaff arrives in a Cadillac

And takes us the rest of the way

To the frontier of the mind

Which is a mecca for nonsense

What else can you do

But plunge into life

And when death comes

Crawl into a cocoon

It’s fun and intensely athletic

To let yourself go

If this were a song it would sound like water

But it’s not it’s a pool of blood

Banging on a drum 

My Big Bob Dylan Fantasy

I wish I was Bob Dylan if I was Bob Dylan

Everyone would love me even if I was being

A total asshole most of the time and once made

Brian Jones cry

Why you ask why would you want to be Bob Dylan

That certainly wouldn’t make Bob Dylan happy

Even Bob Dylan’s not entirely happy being Bob Dylan

Are you up to the job? Can you write great poetry

And play the guitar no I can’t

Play the guitar but I can write great poetry

If I put my mind to it

I could even learn to the play the guitar

I could get a book telling me how to play the guitar

And go buy a guitar

And make sounds come out of the strings

Like filigrees of willow & studios of gold

Sparkling waterfalls ghosts & antiques

But which Bob Dylan would I want to be

The young Bob Dylan in suede & blue jeans

With Suze Rotolo on his arm or the Blonde on Blonde

Bob Dylan with his scarf & outrageous hair

Or the goofy Basement Tapes Bob Dylan

In which he resembles Harpo Marx

A clown in a basement with a weight lifter & a ballerina

Midget paper delivery guy & Rick Danko on accordion
Or the elder Bob Dylan with the tired sagging face

And the voice like a tractor pulling a weight

Of astonishing emotion bitter northern winds & rawhide

Afternoons long journeys with no resolution

Yes yes I say that Bob Dylan because I’m already old

And my desires are still young

And I’m still learning how to be the person I already am

Which has taken nearly seven decades

A handful of pharmaceuticals & an unfocused rage

And I’m still in that skin still in that cage

Warming the bed with my bones

And waking up to do it again and again until I don’t

The Mind is Indigo

An emotion floats and circulates the imposition of cloth. Baudelaire deduces a skunk. A bus station accommodates reading. If you slam this it is fast remembered as a capillary, like the odor of elephants in our dreams. Ugly oracles haunt the houses of Louisiana. And what this means is squirrels. A paradigm blisters with disagreement and flowers into gold. I feel thick and bubbly. Explanations secede from England where our screws sheer reflection, ear into a thin sound of thatch. Calculus spouts air at the garish antique. The forest grows still. We erect our bulb. Float over France because bronze is no beginning at all. Play is increasingly the glue excelling at adhesion. Sagacity and embroidery are the struts of which participles sputter stimulation. Words increase by grappling with ethics and sleight of hand. The day is teasing its frame and the story is in the bungalow. Growth is structural in our evolution but I touch the atmosphere and crack and my guitar makes sounds with nothing ecclesiastical for the crabs. I think my exasperation is catalogued as a lap dance that a subversive culture counsels by symbolism. My serape secludes its algebra in slosh pockets. Soap sips privacy from a Russian guide. Energy shines from matter, wampum like corduroy and glue. Clothing I hear comes from the sound of machinery and confusion clashes with the morality of size. The allegory cradles a newborn philosophy. Power is empty and when its power is truly powerful it springs into fabric like a kangaroo. I’m filled with premonition. The paragraph has given birth to a thermometer. Consciousness is brown, like the indifference of the dryer. The mountain is absorbed by punctuation even though singing had not yet been invented. What is truth? A sneeze spinning around like a flailing thought that verifies the naturalness of the chisel. We’re captivated by the new airplane. A few of us from the swamp are complemented by its unabashed flippancy. The grebe falls suddenly from the sky in undulations of grace. I need a copy of ears, a gentle rain that glides through consciousness while stirring the radio. Garnish crinkles cod as we crinkle science. Today is without precedent, a flicker of time permitted by the uncertainty principle. Meaning seeps through these words, and it’s irritating. Virtue is not always amiable. Sometimes a hat is necessary. Writing is always paper, the inertial mass of a single railroad car. I am a fold of night, a dream swimming with little rubbery outlines. I’m going to be happy when happiness becomes my clouds and powwows. I like emphasis and quitting. There is a dukedom in my head like an outdoor dining patio. Museums, theaters, fine dining and shopping. Let’s talk about seeing things and hose the culture down with sadness and vigor. It’s snowing in Asia. Therefore, a sequence of probabilities can be calculated by using the Schrödinger wave equation. Blood is awkward. Desire is French. Detachment expands the circle. An emotion wrinkles the paper and I juggle knives constructed out of words. I don’t know what to call this exercise in pepper. This fandango of slop. It’s a little ambiguous, but it’s also a living. What can I say? I feel things, and the mind is indigo.

 

Between Hotels

Nothing escapes necessity except the necessity to escape. The world is a place of migration. The colors of the horizon are eternally alluring. It’s a mood that you carry with you, like a crumpled ball of aluminum foil. Each moment is a voyage. Press a button in the elevator and see where it takes you. Mutations are normal. In fact, plans for a new kitchen are spread across the table this very day. It sings in my blood like protein. I can smell the music in an Idaho potato. The door hangs from its hinges pleading to be opened. After all, this is art. Perception is a process, not a jackknife. We’re talking black pepper, marjoram, kaffir lime, aromas that are distinct on their own but send wearers on imaginary getaways and daydream rendezvous when blended with other scents.

Be kind to your legs. Let them finish what they’re doing. Remember: the moon’s distance from the center of the earth is 240,000 miles.

A sentence can justify so many things, including consciousness, which is a basket of light. Vermillion murmurs like an apple hanging in the brain of a blackbird.

Gravitation is mutual. For every action an equal and opposite reaction is produced. Marilyn Monroe wore nothing to bed but a few drops of Chanel No. 5. This proves that the dark is a contradiction of stones and sponges wet and sparkling, funky and fresh.

Every fundamental event in the universe can be interpreted by bringing it close to your face and sniffing it. The olfactory membrane inside the human nose has 50 million receptor cells capable of transmitting information on some 10,000 different odors and is the only part of the central nervous system that has direct contact with the external world.

This includes Wednesday, granite, and meat. It might also mean hair, or a simmering example of vanity.

Infinity climaxes as a shadow by percolating itself through a pretzel. This creates a semantic powder called seeing. The obstetrics of upheaval arrive in perception tracing a ripple of time. Repair yourself with pain. This will entail fatalism. Blood is alive with thirst and will play with secretion until a sentence is produced answering prophecy with criticism and adapting to the vagaries of digestion with exquisite conjugation.

And just like a library where you can find all the best books, the human mind starts the sexual morning with a bubbly ear and raw dancing. The riddle of malt whiskey wanders through consciousness like a swollen begonia. Contrasting cries for help grow into prose with literal terra-cotta sideburns. The floorboards creak. Even the accordion over there in the corner has something to say about Being.

Quality, whatever it may be, is revealed to us as being. This will appear obvious if the gas station is open. The car submits a headlight, a bell rings, and everything falls into place, including these words, which are tilted toward an expectation of bugs.  

 

The Urge to Create

The urge to create is explicit. It’s prodigal and incendiary. Words are forged in a furnace of snow. Clouds boil with purple. The sand turns crimson. My mind fills with reflections. I become voracious for gold. For liberty. For a life lived among horses. My sternum is made of syllables. I can abandon nothing. I’m invested in everything.

The urge to create is pure energy. The music of amphetamines. I want to touch everything. Water, bones, mud. An insect cupped in my hand spreads its wings. The wings are transparent and veined.

The mind isn’t matter but pure energy. Waves. Electrical impulses. The charm of language clarifies this fact. We laugh, we sing, we eat, we sleep. I’m captivated by the organization of bees. The production of honey. The electrical energy of all those insects combining to produce a liquid gold.

The heat of my breath fills a word. Desire opens the world. A storm of sound is assembled on the neck of a guitar. Adjectives swarm over a sentence fueled by predication. Almonds on a blue plate. Time uncoiling in a proverb. A maturing sun. A lake gone mad with the sparkle of diamonds.

A robe of silk hangs on a tin skeleton. We name him Falstaff. The café goes about its business as usual, serving ham and scrambled eggs and pancakes smothered with blueberry syrup. The tide begins to rise. The mind fills with thought. A fan twirls on a tablespoon. Art creates new perceptions, the silk of listening, the appeasement of anger, a tiger gliding through the liquid of the eye.

What is morality? Wine in a crystal glass. A still life by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. The caress of warm water on the skin. The value of friendship. A mountain climbing through your hands.

Eggplant is an agreeable form. Gold is an agreeable metal. It doesn’t belong to the world. It belongs to a supernatural beauty. Parables helps us discover what is gold and what is not gold. The entrance to the cave is blocked. Some of us see shadows. Some of us see fire.

Jellyfish wash ashore, iridescent and beautiful. New perceptions infuse old memories. Experience feeds on experience. It’s a never-ending tautology. The way out is through words incarnating the tangle of the mind. A grebe falls from the sky and plunges into the water. A ghostly necessity falls through a hole in my personality. I can feel the weight of your eyes reading these words. They’re not my words. They’re not your words. They don’t belong to anybody. That’s what makes them words. The weight of your voice putting breath and motion into the words. They exist for your breath. For my breath. For the breath of the unborn. For the breath of the dying. For the breath of cougars and lightning in the distance.

I love the odor of a freshly painted canvas. The construction of snow. The depiction of trees in a shock of wind. Cold and rain. Totems in the fog.

Each thing has a presence.  Napkins, sidewalks, forests. Old barns smelling of horse piss and hay. A bag of freshly bought hardware nails. Gargoyles atop the walls of Sainte-Chapelle. The charm of development. Words propagating like waves where ideas float.

Ideas are hyper-objects, like Nebraska. They’re composed of thought and paper. Wolves and abandoned farmhouses. Spiders and squirrels. Sawdust. A wrinkled old face. Man or woman. Makes no difference when you reach a certain age. Descriptions get smaller. Ideas get larger. Biology becomes unpredictable. Life gets crazy. Intentions get lost in their own manipulations. A corpse falls out of a closet. A rag on a window sill saturates with water. The whole idea of representation is strange. Writing is not a contact sport.

How is it possible to be in a crowd of beings similar to ourselves and yet feel unique? That our own personal narrative is singular and gallant? Is vanity a good thing or a bad thing? Why bad? Why good? Isn’t the good sometimes bad and the bad sometimes good?

The components of sleep glow in a swimming pool. Chiaroscuro is indispensable. Dissonance makes life tolerable.

Impulse is great but you have to learn to accept the bite of remorse.

Me, I like umbrellas. I rejoice in begonias. I kiss the moon. I can hear my heart beat. The parliament is in session. I hear a siren. The cat coughs up a fur ball. I tear off a paper towel and wipe up the vomit. It’s still warm from his body. Outside, the willows sway. Space goes on being space. What was space before there was space? Can gravity be bottled and sold to those who are tired of floating? What would the dead tell us if they were able to return? Do they come to us in dreams? Or are dreams just dreams and nothing else? If time cold be folded and put in a suitcase, which hours would I choose to bring with me?

I like two o’clock. Always have. And midnight. Midnight is the rupture of rapture in an invisible ear. Sleep and rain in perfect conjunction. The affiliation of thought with the warrant of the sky.

The afternoon lifted itself into my eyes and said hi, it’s two o’clock. Midnight stopped by later and we drank until morning. I awoke feeling strangely beautiful. I became a glissando. Snow fell on the river. My lips danced on syllables until my tongue got drunk. I bought tickets for Paris.

I need the lucidity of water. It inspires me. Rain, rivers, puddles, oceans, lakes, ponds. It assumes so many forms. But it is finally the currents of the Seine in January that fascinate me, that make me want to write something. The turbulence is exciting and menacing. Even if, weeks later, I end the day by doing the dishes. Something was said. Something needs to be said. Something always speaks.

 

 

Action Inaction

Consciousness is exhausting. And so is rubber. But what is reality? That question gets asked a lot. But does anybody have an answer? A lot of people do. They’re called philosophers. I like to think of reality as a blatant wind thudding through the trees, beating drums and hallucinating. It’s either that or a garage door. Those creaks and springy sounds they make when they open and all those funny odors come flying out.

As you might’ve guessed, I like maneuvering words. It allows me to act like Technicolor. I can glow into longhand or type my way into hills of assumption. But it’s this private pain that is so hard to put into words. I feel like an ocean engorged with squid. I use forceps to handle the pronouns. They’re so slippery. And they smell of abstraction, like the rain. The shoulder was invented to carry the burden of the world. We also have totems, and tattoos and trumpets. These things help.

One day I hope to evoke everything in a single sentence and retire. I will learn to play the Fauve guitar and create sounds of such savage hue that the effect will feel more like a punch to the stomach than a religious belief. A song is a form of bruise and if it wrinkles it will clutter with scientific handshakes and resemble a forest of boiling taxis.

Dragons of concentration ride on streams of consciousness. The lumber is perfectly present, however imperfectly sawn, or expressed in grammar. Verticality has its shadows. But the slobber of abstraction enriches our perspective of cloth.

Pain is often sexual. Which is why it is so often a pleasure. There are adjectives available to describe this phenomenon, and bungalows in which to enact it. The sound of it gets sweet and light drips from the lamps ins scarves of delicate implication. The climate unseals itself in scripture. Silk trails across the neck. Sensations of creative liberation run along a tangent of bone and skin trembling with examples of gold. There is clutter in consciousness and proposition and meaning. This is what makes it so energetic. So impenetrable to gravity. Even the limestone swarms with its science.

Life is erratic and conversational. There is a house in New Orleans where we find this amply demonstrated in a general looseness of direction and antifreeze. Experience tastes like chicken. Experience is what happens when syllables interact with milk. The map collapses into words dripping with Delaware. We can smell tallow. Intentions are hectic with tin. A harridan rages within a leviathan RV. The TV is unpredictable. Each day has its own sounds and odors. And it drives us crazy.

When Mick Jagger asked me to join the Rolling Stones, I didn’t know what to say. I jingle when I walk. And my keys are always a little sticky during the summer. I can juggle a few oranges but I refuse to bark like a dog. Language is hallucinatory. But powerful. If they can use a song writer I can use a wider desk.

The politics of the potato are a little strange, but worthwhile remarking. I can still smell the dirt. Clearly, there is a trace of Paris in the salon, and if this conversation is to continue, let’s let the subtleties stir into action. The drop of a nail can sound like an epitome. And the paragraph has given birth to a turnstile. What do you say we pass through, and let Portugal overwhelm us with its haircuts and cork.

Culture is ontological. A fist of ganglions holds a pound of sugar in each skull, in each maieutic balloon. Dignity is round like a reproductive organ. My skin tells a story of labor and pain. If your  mouth is in prison, you should visit more bars. There are too many referents but not enough signs. The present tense is tart as a martini olive, but the future is in vermilion, anxious and ornery like the twinkle of an incendiary noun.

For the ocean is plunged into its own diversions and when the river becomes a waterfall the hunchback of Notre Dame walks among these words murmuring something about ornaments. I sometimes imagine that the dead are trying to pull us into their realm. Heaven’s parabola slams into fireworks. We need to re-enchant the world. Seethe in awakened syllables. The capacity to gaze at something, anything, is a gift. I like to watch my hand dance on the ceiling. I like to gather its shadows and squeeze them into words. Why is there something instead of nothing? All five senses insist that there is more to a goblet than pewter. The table causes itself by pressing its surface against the hands. When we walk in exhibition of ourselves we are purple. But when consciousness dissolves in sleep, the house of language opens its doors. Everyone is welcome to attend. Just do what the words suggest. Camaraderie is prodigal. The journey begins with a single ghost. This is why I smell like a suitcase. I’m not from here. I’m from elsewhere. For who hasn’t felt the wind in their hair and wondered what time breakfast is served in the afterlife?