Hippopotamus

Why do I do this? Why do I feel compelled to put words down on paper? Will it fill stadiums with people waving smartphones? Will it keep me from dying? Will it make me immortal? Is it any fun to be immortal when you’re dead?  

It’s the very futility of the thing that draws me in, the subversive energy of making something of no possible use, a document of hedonistic glowworms, a subjective tortilla, a cabbage of vertical consciousness that sways me into sewing words of clay and hunger, an embroidery of dusky migration.  

This thing which is wallets to a dada bulb. This sound of letters in a drop of heart. This chemistry of sensation, this extension of shadows. The whole thing shakes like an ocean detonating glands of kaleidoscopic light in a Budapest of humming narration. If a mouth opens a fugue balloons into Bach. Comparisons create more differences than similarities and so lengthen into sequoias of canopy and choir. My lady’s lips are like the west coast of Ireland and must serve their purposeless purpose in a Kantian flood of emergent fire. 

Bob Dylan on a horse. 

Nothing pleases me more than mustard. The skin of night telling consonants of seashore, ravenous vowels mushrooming in a slop of intermediary rain. The elbow slams its grease on a wrinkle of steam and militates against stubble. This confers chewing and art and instinctively becomes a postmark slamming its door on a glistening abstraction. If I flop on the couch at 8:00 p.m. enfoldments of reverie recoil into catwalks and I can feel what pleasure there is in being an invention, an emotion so big it mirrors reality, a dream of slate and exotic biology. If there is a giant version of myself elsewhere in the universe let it be spectral and wear my eyes like a paper skidoodle. Let it stir into virtue. Let it become a mockingbird, a culture aloud on a spoon.

If I feel sticky at the airport let me flop and flap my way to a hole of wind and disappear into history like a simulacrum squirting headlights at the night. 

Picture a gold box containing a stillborn opera, something that would delight Joseph Cornell. Think of a smear of significance flirting with spoons on my forehead. Swerve it into accordions. Park it near a loaf of pumpernickel. Engorge it with clouds. Let it happen during an argument. Lean into letters amid the oarlocks of a foggy description.  

The reason I do this is simple: it makes me happy. I can throw a face at a thread of elevator spit and watch it exasperate sense with a strawberry and a rock in B minor.  

I don’t sneer at ears. No sir. Nor will I ever fully understand the personality I drag around. Death falls through a preposition and finds life attracting a crowd of astronauts. So be it. Bleeding is all about longhand, and the problems of the sidewalk sparkle with a peppery music. My wool is caused by syntax. And if we unite one another in writing our muscles will serve us taproots and the delicacy of dachsunds will glue itself to the water and bounce into parallels where the brocade turns pink and hippopotamus.  

 

Invocation

I flow into the invocation enigmatic pungency. This is called interacting. We ripen in snow. Cram it with ermine. Möbius blue sputtering the truth of rain. Bump a monument under the air. The kinetic boat glue opened by pliers. Clutter and luxuriate in our pockets. My dab and deform the wiggle with skin. The hymn sends us jumping into a hammerhead’s hat brimming with Germany. My arms pause in mutation. It anchors a painted red and a white and blue seclusion, darkness and sympathy. My stick bumps the heart and fragrances, beggars, groans, dampness hook into this existence and there is a consequent conviviality and the light is a form of gasoline that weighs as much as a buttonhole. Plurality shows thought. Do you believe in singing? The sky is totally eczema. Below the authorization structure invites provocation. Moreover the form of a farm is in its livelihood. This is punches to a dirigible. Zip to a propagation. I came into this life riding on a comet. There is a quicker way to begin to be hectic. Reality is a shiver and a sweat and we lengthen the volume of thumbs. Radio is watched hugging one another. The hoist suspends the pipes in solid resilience. Let’s explore consciousness by spreading cowslip. Or swing it with a pendulum. The yardstick of the eye stirs handsprings. The stick stirs paint. I find a screw in the sawdust of sound and appetite. Redeem the profligacy of singing with a coiffure and an angle. The ooze swims with cockeyed worms. Representation obstructs its chains. We remain unconvinced. What can we do? We burn a colloquy and powder it and dangle. The Mediterranean is peppered with sticks. Circles of Apollinaire. The Cinnamon King whose earrings whisper artemesia. Powder blue ovals accelerate the noise of my skin. What does this say about pulse? The air reeks of wonder. Dictionaries are engines of thought. Intent and a lip in a system for reflection. A thunder that is snappy and bright, a biology like a jellyfish, a drink of coffee that crackles when the wind blows and the piano sweats and anything horizontal rattles in some way that we can share. The carp are riding the rails. The tie helps us to understand granite. The glimmer of goose bumps are instruments for making bourbon. The flop of extrusion in a mind of ice tastes of oblivion. Atmospheric pressure equiped with socks. Pain is the deformation of information. Glue is the adhesion of tin. The rain is a medication. I spit prescription. Power shouts adjectives and butter. A bird in a bottle and a stab of grammar petitions the adverbs to cohere into a concept. This is called spinning, or solving the mystery of glass with an ugly towel.

 

 

The Birthday Jump

I remember the first & only time I parachuted it was 1964 my 16th birthday a rite of passage if you will from the old man an aerospace engineer & former WWII B24 bomber pilot I practice-jumped from oil barrels taught how to fall back then when the time came & the plane got fired up & took us up high in the sky over Snohomish county mostly pretty farm country I got the signal & stood out on the little step & took hold of the wing strut with both hands wind blasting into my face & racketing my clothes & waited for the signal to let go the instructor inside a genial guy in his 30s counted down with his hand & shouted now! & I let go & tumbled crazily didn't remember anything I'd been taught I was senseless with terror then the chute opened I felt something scrape my neck & jerked like a puppet into air with the canvas ballooning over my head & realized there was something wrong with the left pull cord it was missing the men on the ground kept yelling at me from a little transistor radio pull your left cord! pull your left cord! & I kept yelling back I have no left cord! I have no left cord! I can't turn! I can't turn! but of course they couldn't hear  me it was a one-way radio they no doubt wondered what the hell I was thinking  they stopped yelling they must've just figured something was wrong with the radio I stopped yelling the silence was weird I'd never heard such silence birds went sailing by it surprised me I didn't think birds flew that high it was really nice floating in the sky but then as I neared the ground I worried over some high wires I barely cleared those then began drifting to a big field of freshly furrowed black dirt as a farmer in his tractor looked up watched me go over I was told not to look at the ground but I did I couldn't help it then wham my legs hit the ground a knee hit my jaw they warned me that might happen bite my tongue off but I stood up & was ok.

 

The Fluctuation of Pronouns in the Abalone Lounge

Hallucinations deepen and I pack my clothes. My robin is pretty. The endurance of feeling is unpredictable. Coffee juggles my nerves below pounds of cheerful light. The insoluble propinquity of memory is sewn by time. I spit propellers beneath the clouds. Heartache drips presumption. The sleep of angels moves us wide-eyed into the sublime. A New Bohemia. A place where the sand is soft and gravity bursts with eclipse. Pearl earrings repose on the floor. The seashore is an open structure. Sidewalks hold the world. Arms reaching singing out of their sleeves reaching for ablution. Glasses smeared with butter acquire the look of coughing and war. This will describe itself as a medication and then act in a play by an anonymous sparkle. My reactions to Renoir are sympathetic to rocks. There can be nothing without something to make nothing nothing for nothing without something is nothing and that is something. When the words grow tense we discover a light switch in which the screws have turned brown with age. The Excitement Sisters write a song about garbage. Description begins to mushroom. Daylight serves the slop of chaos. Without a little anger to fuel my grammar I’m just another nerve in the ramification of life. I curve by pronoun. A vaporous mood becomes a motion and that motion becomes an orange rolling across a table in a bistro. The careful thread of a wobbly personality skidoodles with all its muscle intact. I go to the bank. I drive a Subaru. A woman complements my Subaru. I rob the bank. The Subaru serves me well. Life continues. The hallucinations continue. We grow rattan. The sun shines down. Our skin is slippery. Reflections later turn gray in the mind. Gray is ok but blue is better. The imagery of heaven is all about flowers. The laundry drips by the shore. There is the shore of life and the shore of death and both are the same shore. I feel a hunger I don’t quite understand. It’s a hunger but not a hunger for food. Before I became a language I tried my luck at iodine. Despair is the flip side of hope. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way. It’s no wonder that I like philodendrons. The philosophy of the philodendron is dark and slow and carries more light than water. If there were no light there would be no darkness. There would only be fish. The comics are a kingdom of dots. I will build a blob that explains everything. I will explain granite and brass and the power of chiaroscuro. The blob will confirm the sounds of Montmartre. Blood is metaphysical. It carries oxygen and iron and oozes out of the skin when the skin is punctured or cut. You have to pay attention to these things. Mud exemplifies stamina. Silk warrants silk. Grumbling needs blue. Evocations of pink and violet. There is elegance in equilibrium but none in whistling. The horses yearn for a maneuver with lightning if it leads to confusion and apparels the hills with grazing. No universe is exact. The cuticles affirm this. You can yank a tomato from a bin of produce but you must rely on extraversion if you plan to expand the fluctuation of pronouns in the abalone lounge. This is why Kurt Cobain played his guitar in a cupboard. There is no ambiguity in footwear. There is the spirit to consider, and the lumber of reminiscence. Everything else is just silence and birthdays.

Confessions of an Impersonal Spectator

Another way of understanding khaki is in terms of mesmerism. The human brain is divided into competing philosophies which are connected at the center of the cerebral cavity by a tissue of moonlight. When I tell my friends that I have a brain, they tell me that they have one as well. I have no reason to doubt this. These people are engaged in extremely interesting adventures. We all wonder about what the universe is made of, how it works, what we’re doing in it and wherever it is it’s going, if it’s going anywhere at all. Imagine a city made entirely of bricks. If we substitute ‘universe’ for ‘city’ and ‘particle’ for ‘brick,’ the narration becomes gelatinous and cork.

Inside an elevator, however, the evaluation of our situation is very different. We have different explanations for the phenomena in the elevator. X calls it a process. Y calls it a ripple in time. Z pockets an ensemble of biases then abandons them many years later. There is no method to prove who is right. What we do know is that light is energy and energy has mass. There is no excuse for seaweed. If the wings are simple and the blood is ardent a smile can be explained by innocent inertia.

There are eight types of mass, which means that there are eight manners of speaking. The first is trash. Rags, cardboard, empty bottles and cans. The second is bathrobes. The third is eucalyptus. The fourth is apple blossom. The fifth is sweat. The sixth is dust. The seventh is concrete and the eighth is hairspray.

Gravitational mass is the raison d’être of a bag of potato chips and inertial mass is a school of soluble fish lit up by lightning.

Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy is a book by Saskia Sassen about populations of people displaced, exiled, and imprisoned by the predatory practices of neo-liberal capitalism. This explains little as to why a feather and a cannonball fall with equal velocity within a vacuum and even less to say about the miracle of pancakes, but it does have much to suggest about why poets like Lorine Niedecker live in poverty to do their art, or Bartleby the Scrivener perished in The Tombs.

The point is that objects within the solar system do not move by some mysterious force exerted upon them from a distance but by the nature of the neighborhood through which they are moving. I can carve a fire out of a bar of soap but I cannot make it blink like a waiter at the Café de la Mairie near Saint-Sulpice in Paris. That requires the existential magic of a Jean-Paul Sartre.

This is why I’ve decided to assign myself a position in life similar to that of Stuart Sutcliffe with the Beatles. A sunglassed Impersonal Spectator, marginal, insignificant, and transcendental, struggling to do what I can on the bass.

Unless I prefer not to.