The Other Side

Let us assume a sensation that is humored by clouds and hair. Let us assume a feeling of scintillation. And the intention of it is yelling. And there are punches and riddles. Let us assume that there is an airplane made of glass and coffee and spurs. The snow I’ve nailed to this sentence is a gratuity. If I slap the water like a hawk it glitters with crustaceans and minerals. It isn’t really saying much, but solitude is good for the soul, as are wildebeests and sunlight. Is it possible to chisel redemption from a waterfall? I don’t know, but there’s a shameful amount of homelessness in the United States. Taxi headlights penetrate the night. Did I mention meeting Buffalo Bill one night in a dream? It’s true. I had just developed a wattle beneath my chin and was thinking of growing a goatee. I admired Buffalo Bill’s goatee very much. This proves that the true nature of the dream is cradled in desire, just as we suspected. This is why the mind rides a whirlwind of words. And the willow is glued together with a kiss. What a strange proposition life has turned out to be. Culture is ontological. It has to be. Otherwise, hair is just an enigma. My emotional spectrum is resonant with red. This explains nothing, but if we all assume that our reproductive organs enjoy a wisdom all their own, there is a dark genius at the heart of it, and causality and keys. We all live in a jukebox paradise. Consider the hum of gravity as a form of singing, an undulation of energy extending throughout the universe somewhat like a stethoscope, or trumpet. I think of this every time I iron a shirt, or watch the snow fall on a river. Distance plus velocity equals we’re alone. Equals whipped cream in a red mug. Equals ambient web. Equals the sag of time in a sidewalk. I don’t say these things for the sake of sewing, I say them because my mind is pressed against the door and I feel full of water, like a color walking in bones. I’m trying to get to the other side. The other side of what, I don’t know. I’ve just heard it’s greener on the other side. You know? I mean, how can it not be? Who doesn’t like to stand in the shower murdering syntax? It takes time for the blood to circulate. Once the sexual morning gets going the rest comes easy. You just hop on a Corot and let Lake Como do the rest.

And Here I Am Crawling into the Sky

“One third of our life is spent in sleep,” said Gérard de Nerval.  “After a few minutes lethargy, a new life begins.” Is this your dream or mine? I’m going to say for the sake of convenience it’s mine, and also because the airport is surrounded by hotels, good hotels, the ones that offer a sufficient amount of towels. Dreaming is one way to crawl into the sky. Translating the moon is another. Who speaks moon? Learning moon is difficult. It’s a cross between the Algonquin as spoken by the Blackfeet and French. For example, some feelings are longer than others. Others are thicker, denser, and with the piquant flavor of apparition, which is the smell of sage coupled with seclusion. Is one ever truly alone? The moon tells us that gray is ok but blue is better. Better to be blue than gray. Better to be literature than literal, coruscation than clay. And here I am crawling into the sky. Think railroad and wear wrestling. Magnetize benediction and swallow reality. This is the indigo where it alters a brain. Reality decorates age. Sags beside a gamble. Open fire. Fiddle pickles. I feel alive and hold my trumpet to endeavor gold. I am my own bed about a daub of red and crinkle science in a contraption of fingernail, like definition. Yesterday I saw a man repair a ceiling fan in a cartoon. It caused me to smell of humus. And then I felt the need to be clever and went looking for a splash of divinity to get rid of this feeling, which I did, and it sagged through time. Is our social being ever done with being social? Is it ever truly winter? Yes, and it’s irritating. Sensation serves independence to the balloons. My perceptions percolate through an opinion. I feel a certain sorcery in the construction of blood. I insist on fog. There is a treasure in your eyes called seeing. I want you to see it. I want you to see seeing as I see seeing and see it and be it and open your eyes and paint and bond to a cloth. The drive to be great is flinging itself among the empty. I will send you a tie to think about this. This is why biology has paradise in it. It’s not a gag so much as a blossom. Dreamy and soft. This means fulmination is happening. I like to bubble and chronicle such things. I feel parallels for breakfast that make me myriad in my itching. It’s so beautiful to oblige a sidewalk with walking to the side. Let’s just say that I like to collect sensations and beat them into contrasting hues. The kitchen widens during cows. It makes me demanding and pale. My reactions to Renoir keep changing. And yet nothing pleases me more than a tray of ice cubes. I can say no more about indigo than what I said about the seashore. The chin refines the mouth by being interactive and simple. These are the incidents that shiver at the drop of a heart. And this is the smell that whispers through creosote. These are the words beneath the moral. And this is the moral that makes no sense to be angry at life when the enfoldments wrinkle into pronouns.

Magnetic Morning of Eyes

Magnetic morning of eyes. Waves crowd the window of rain. The appeasement of squeezing glides through a detour of hunger. Wrap the pickle from the park. My life hangs from a kitchen sink. Wheels imitate the weight of transcendent glory. Colors of the sky crisis plunged in silence. The climate carves horror from the tall pink throbs of paragraph Notre Dame. Words incarnate noise luminous with eggs. The grebe falls listening to focus. Hit songs necessitate thought. Arabesques of secretion apprehensive of themselves. Hot diskus of gold. The sun is sanguine. Air bends with silk. When the river walks through a charm of flowers mahogany swarms with foreheads. Passion extends the invisible ear. Light and snow and paper in undulations of grace. I feel a hopping manipulation in my age. Crustaceans crowded with shapes. A pepper railroad trumpets endeavor at the house of engines. Indentation is about a daub of definition. Wrinkles on an apple. An apparition dipped in idea. Brain full of reason that also insists on shadows, the capacity to gaze and become a glissando. Rocks in my head. Ireland in syllables. Anything involving prepositions is Pythagorean. Even the birch is doing delicate things to the air. Meaning is an interior phenomenon. I listen to the velocity of variation. Proverbs of a box stirred with fireworks. Here is what I think of kelp I think it’s a sensation with heart and sparkle. The social being our colors wield. Whipped cream a map and a red mug as I go to the pump in the morning of delicate agreement. Spheres and keys define the jingle of mind. I boom a bug of needles, my perceptions of time notwithstanding. Fatalism mushrooms sag with imagination and its power to glow. I’m big with play. Let me punctuate the air with a house of language. And so I do and the gamble has camaraderie and is prodigal and kind. The prophecies of the alligator are a fog suckling a headlight. When we ride the green train a thumb of semantic treasure presses the cement. We like to think it’s alive. And it is. We walk in exhibition of our own abandonment and find that it helps to plant roses and boil. It takes time to salt the circulation. Start getting sexual when the fingers expand to include tubes of ceremony. Gargantuan pumpernickel cries of secretion tinged with sandstone spit. Eat the rain. Reflect a hedge. Burst a pencil with a sketch of knives. Magnetic morning of eyes puffing and shaking itself into words. Clap your hands. Submit a headlight. Lift your suitcase and go. Audacity is the power to chirp when the hermitage opens to gauze. If the hills have angels then there is divinity in embroidery and the air is secure in its processions of sound. Any day now could be a day of stains and pleasures. I’m at home in Italy. Blatant, blessed, and taffeta.

The Science of Nowhere

I don’t know

What do you think

Are hills and glue a form of despair

Or mere referents in a poem

Seeking the dignity of a movie

About a reproductive organ

Named Abigail? The traffic today

Was mild on the way to the library

But I golfed my way through Switzerland

A little later and discovered a hole

In a cardboard box that filled me with light

And understanding. This is how words expand

Into eyes and bend the winter air

Into a ceremony of tigers

A tall pink tower

Sparkles below these words

And in it you will find passion and grace

And an escalator which comes in handy

As you move to the top of the tower

Where my hand dances on the ceiling

It’s as if I had a head full of nitrous oxide

And meaning seeped through my words

No matter what I said. Here, for example,

Is a map of my heart. These are the mountains

And this is a lake in which the sag of time

Has been omitted and all we see are waves

Quietly moving toward the shore

Infinity climaxes as a shadow

In a quart of philosophy, the sun

Shining down like a lunatic

Caboose in an evergreen

It’s all about flowers my friend

The literal is only a dime

Away from becoming a dollar

Ninety eight and a vertigo serious as the science

Of migration in a sentence headed precisely

Nowhere 

How the Brain Represents Time

Cartesian materialism, the view that nobody espouses but almost everybody tends to think in terms of, suggests the following subterranean picture: drunk rats dancing on the backache of a powerful-looking man named Richard with a black eye and a tattoo of thorns snoozing in a chamber of knotweed. He will awake to find the dark energies of the universe knitted into rhizomes as time moves over the waters in a paragraph harnessed to the caprice of dolphins and refute the Cartesian Theatre altogether as an inaccurate theory of human consciousness. The hours fall silent. Time reinvents itself. Words incarnate the tangle of the mind. The silk of listening necessitates thought. A cuckoo appears via spring mechanism and goes cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, thus registering the final bliss of time as it ornaments space with expressions of grace and Pythagorean muffins. The ruins of Rome, the domes of London, the bells of Paris. Broadcasts from the Walter Cronkite 60s hurling deeper into outer space. Time thickens despite hawks. The raspberries mature in their bed. Contraptions of time vibrate Wisconsin. The California sand ripples with wind and wave and the time of the tides moving in, moving out. My favorite clock is a cloud of syllables bouncing on my knee.  Rhythm is time and pentameter is time and prepositions and cork are manifestations of time. We see time in the bark of trees, in the rings of trees, in the foliage and bareness of trees. We know that information moves around in the brain, getting processed by various mechanisms in various regions. Our intuitions suggest that our streams of consciousness consist of events occurring sequence, and that at any instant a young woman will appear and help an older woman to the door. This is what happens when sequence becomes a plane ticket for Paris. Autumn creeps slowly into the air dragging winter behind it. The shiny buttons of Einstein’s accordion increase the sterling morning. I spin faster and faster among the stars. Time is the belch of infinity. Time is motion and shape. Time is salt in a Martian’s ear. A breaker unfurling on Tahitian sands. The opium of grammar, the chronicles of a downtown bus. At 8:41 on a May morning the woman upstairs turns on her shower. A lawn mower roars in the park. The sun rises into the sky. Time is the lip on which the sky walks.

Sometimes I Think of Growing Orchids

Sometimes I think of growing orchids in the rain. Knowledge oneself. The world is full of bananas like a dog. The allegory ate its own or not. I’m dry now. People sing and their ideas creak open like an old weathered epitome. Or present participle. Does reflection play in perception? Skin breaks and blood appears. Animals recognize my odor as a maieutic balloon in a comic strip. Twinkling cardboard thrills through my thumb. Be a form of secretion. I continue to combine makes the sound of sympathy. The words desire realm. The perfume of the harbor. I like to prolong muffins unofficially stippled. Warm farm tense like a truth or bar of soap. Humming a song of thread liberates vision. Vermillion murmurs it. I like to hang like an apple that the sublime structures as oars. Dangle snaps in a concertina. A bakery bakes and a construction charges work in the greenhouse it tries with play. Punches are the antibodies that circle like a suitcase. The conquest of story flows with erratic wrinkles. Development beams sheen. A mouth full of turmoil scours a yardstick the hive shows, and collides with hierarchy. This turns L’Estaque like a swollen atmosphere and resolves the issue of apples. And then I hear a pharmaceutical thread seethe penumbra and feel completely spread. Copper punches my belief in writing. Expansive battles and a cow jumps over the horses. A mourning perspective of sifted dynasties dares ripping. My statements are crawling is not the same as strolling and groaning and shoving and goes swimming anyway. Grass is the next thing I remember. By this I mean babble. Sparkling hands can read ice. I have to think about emotion. And dilation. I want to know more and yearn for interpretation. My moody contradictions, which are rectangular and round, bubble opinion. The insects scatter as the flower agrees to amuse us. The change is warm and correspondent. A cause of vividness. The intestines present cinnamon with enlistment. We choose our genre by what kind of train rumbles through. I climb a cry that trickles weight. A memory in rattan and asphalt steams like rain on glass. Baking is navigable abstraction. We feed the boat ripping the hull, but the expansion is clean. We push the bend into heft. I serve conversation a fire and argue the ground into sexual abandon. I assemble bits of truth whose words excite the imagery of insult. Bats dangle in a mouth of cabbage. Therefore we must avenge the zip codes, particularly as hot butter in an embarrassed world. The next time I will merely paint on the palette. Gravity’s spirit dances. The pool expands and becomes diplomatic and emotional. By that I mean talk. And crackling and idea. Opinions panic in bird jelly. Flying is not so flashy when it is written down as a length of mind about something. After getting dressed, clothing recoils into catwalks. The Möbius seashore fights to include bugs. This is a detail wearing a wall where I nudge punctuation out of a bag of genesis. I start various sensations and anticipate vapor. And so you see, I have a heavy fire to pack. Poetry is a morsel that mushrooms to the rock. I stand in my bones lamenting stationary. There is myriad enhancement in the smell of it which is slightly Etruscan. A mind and a shadow touch and rattle. Limestone gloves absorb the winter. Life is erratic. Am I a fiasco, or a United States of sunlight? How can I answer anything without a lobby? Gravity tastes like antifreeze. I open the door and there stands Pablo Picasso. And so you see a paragraph is a lake. Eyes are the hinges for the doors of the mind. But where is it? Where is my mind? I feel oceans in me. Opposites knotted in knots. My inner fire gives testimony to a dark genius named Convolvulus, Emperor of the Bindweeds.  I have maneuvered some symmetry for my desk of dirt, my window of rain, and play a cornet. The appeasement of a nerve feels heavenly. It gets up and walks to its appointment. The sky pummels causes entirely imagined as a tactic to worry. This makes it difficult to Bach. Drugs on exhibition walk on the wind. Ideas impelled by lightning. Despair comes furnished with intellect. I’m back at you with personality. The steam is flexed in a Martian’s ear. The vagina sits down and grins.

In Praise of Escalators

I enjoy riding escalators. It’s different than riding elevators. The escalator is in the open, riding through space. The passenger may hurry, walk briskly up the flow of steps while feeling the additional velocity as the rotating chain brings the steps round through another cycle, or ease into a posture of quiet detachment and ride the grooved metal steps according to one’s inclinations, drinking in the environing space while gently ascending or descending. One is not enclosed in a box, as in an elevator, but out in the open, as one might be at the summit of Everest grinning into a camera with the Himalayan peaks behind piercing a hard blue sky, or floating above Tanzania in a hot air balloon watching a herd of elephants migrate across Katavi National Park rather than a cluster of mannequins displaying lingerie and polo shirts.

The escalator permits lassitude. It says “Here are my steps. Ride them. Be serene. Reflect on life’s joys and woes, or stride upon them  -  if you must  -  as they assist in raising your body to the heavens, or carry you in a slow descent to the regions below.”

Escalators are generally found in shopping malls, aiports and department stores. Commercial places. This I don’t like. I would prefer to find escalators in more bucolic surroundings. On a desert, for instance, or prairie. I imagine a hole in the sky where people disappear, or appear in a moment of bewildered stupefaction, descending the steps to the grasses below, the grasshoppers and butterflies and other creatures of the earth. But humanity, driven by a mercantile and not a lyrical impulse, installs them in malls, the great cathedrals of commerce. Look at them: the symmetry of ascent and descent mimics the symmetry of birth and death, the movement of tides, the fables of wealth and misfortune. The poetry is intrinsic. The journeys are short.

We all know what it feels like when the body gets tired. It feels heavy. It wants rest. It wants to lie on the ground, on a bed, on a floor. But the mind, too, grows heavy. Its battles and oppositions weary the neurons until it becomes a labor to assemble a thought, a single sentence. It takes great weight to produce a wonderful lightness. A book is an intellectual apparatus for lifting the mind into the heavens, a crane for letting its cargo down slowly, a tractor for the complications of the ground. The escalator is a product of books and geometry, mechanical engineering and power. The mind is a product of curiosity, escalations of intellectual arousal.

Lean closer, reader, and let me see the elegance of your forehead. Let this sentence be an escalator for you, inclining up, inclining down. Dignified and poised all the way to the end.   

There is no shame in riding an escalator. The planet is unoffended. Gravity is unoffended. Earth’s orbit is in no way harmed or compromised. There are primal elements at work. Idler sprockets. A floor plate and a combplate. Gears, cogs, belts, chains, motors, handrails and structural supports. A balustrade. Camaraderie and solitude. Infinite parallels. Incline yourself. Rise. Descend. Watch your feet as the steps tuck under the floor in a loop of eternal alliance.