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.