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.