The Sentence as a Form of Crochet

What else can I do with this abstract ice, this jingle of bells, but be silent and enjoy it? A tall pink tower sparkles below these words. Whispers of cumbersome chronology help grease the gears of the elevator. I sometimes imagine the dead are trying to pull us into their realm. Could it be that Rome is even more wonderfully imperfect than at first imagined? I can feel something hopping around in my heart. Snakes and rapiers are more like axioms than gumdrops. But what is it that awakens the syllables of a warm farm crowded with shapes as the afternoon begins to lift itself into the air and a totem of vowels chatters its story of frogs and whales? Is it a big man doing delicate things, or a shiny Pythagorean pain? There is a meaning that seeps through these words and it would explain everything if I could only find it. I do know I prefer the sheets tucked in at the end of the bed but that doesn’t help explain the powers that are invisible to us, the splashes of divinity sweeping over our oars. Form is the beginning of consciousness. Touch is optional. Gnawing is acoustical. Conquest is rudimentary. The vast unfolding of a consummate ache renders one’s fingers more personal, more nimble of themselves as soon as one realizes that that inner pain, that inner hunger is riding a train through Texas. I’m totally into dumbbells. If my tongue is encumbered by a rabbit I accommodate its being and wrestle my incentives to the ground. I get up. I look around. And if the sun is still there I cheer the light and approve the playground slide. Raw essential being urges conference with a rhinoceros. I create holes in the air to escape from war. This causes art and stimulation. Darkness dangles like bats in a mouth of cabbage. I call this necromancy. But it doesn’t work. No dead people appear. Just Bob Dylan on a horse. Tinfoil is emotional. I feel its attractions whenever I smell a catalogue rotting in somebody’s garage. Maybe it’s best to leave the dead alone. I’ll be joining them one day, but for the meanwhile I’ll continue my cartwheels and sexy indiscriminate perceptions of singing. I saw Finland once, in a dream, which is the true geographic location of Finland. I saw the face of its deliverance, and huge fuzzy eyebrows on the faces of the men, and women so flashy and beautiful that my eyes unraveled in gold. It’s then that I realized that the universe is bigger than I initially thought and may be applied to the principles of the accordion, which goes in and out as one squeezes it, producing melodies and dilations of spirit. I can secrete anything I want. Ramification is something else. For that, we’ll need an engine and a large comfortable armchair. It’s time that we included our elbows in something. One can accomplish miracles in bas-relief. Opera stirs the senses. It’s here that we begin to feel a heavy fire in the growling air and let the sidewalk do its thing, just lay itself out in all that concrete, allowing us to abandon our oars and luxuriate in the sweetness of incantation.

On Getting Old

Existence grows in weight as one ages. It’s as if lived phenomena accumulated like alluvial deposits in a river and cemented into lithological regrets. Disillusionments, terminations, humiliations, hallucinations, chagrins, manias, aversions, divisions, conflicts, chaos, rocks.

Wrinkles don’t help. Nor does arthritis. Drugs, sometimes. Nevertheless, marvels continue: snow, electricity, the universe.

One discovers a subversive elegance in some of the uglier aspects of life. Beauty belongs to the young. Old age finds consolation in being less subject to the tyrannies of beauty. By the time one has reached one's sixties, one has experienced enough loss, mortality, sickness, treachery, duplicity, and disappointment to realize what a true comedy human existence can be, albeit not a particularly funny one.

I watched a video on YouTube of Willie Nelson in 1962 sing “Crazy” to a television audience and marveled at how much his appearance has changed. In 1962 he was 29, a young man on the threshold of maturity. His hair was lush and red and impeccably combed. He looked like a cross between Liberace and Kirk Douglas. Now in his eighties, he is more fully himself. His face is weathered and craggy and his hair, which is still lush and red but tinged with gray, spills over his shoulders. He looks like an outlaw of the old weird American west. He’s a perfect example of how the losses that come with the passage of time become fruitions, chrysalis and increase. The richest sounds come from a battered guitar. And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

I have often heard people in their sixties and seventies remark that they feel the same as when they were eighteen. I can understand that. At 68, I feel that way myself. I like the same music and have the same tendencies toward wild, crazy behavior. I also know what the repercussions of that behavior feel like and are much harder to bear in old age. I remember hangovers in my forties that felt like warmed over death. I also know that when I enter a room the heads of young ladies don’t turn to look fetchingly upon my wrinkled skull, the one with the little hairs growing out of my ears. I didn’t have an enlarged prostate at age 18, which causes me to hold up lines to the urinal in the men’s room, nor a paunch or big fuzzy eyebrows or liver spots. My future at 18 offered a grand panorama of options and possibilities. At 68, I’m invited to look over cremation and burial opportunities.

So no, life at 68 doesn’t feel quite the same as it did at 18. Although, occasionally, it does. And when I see Mick Jagger leaping about on a stage in his seventies with greater energy and nimbleness than he did in his early twenties, I don’t know what to think. Is he just making it look that way, or is it possible that in some fashion we actually can grow younger as we get older? Existence does feel heavier. But it also feels much more mortal and temporary, and that extra sense of ephemerality does something to the spirit, inflates it with hot, euphoric glee.

An Elevator Door Opens

An elevator door opens. Out steps an abstraction dressed in handsprings. What this means is sensation, keen sensation, exquisite sensation, the language of fish and chips and dreams trickling puddles of reflection on Sunday mornings. The delicate noises of Cézanne’s marvelous life.

Please somebody help me. I’m drowning in ovations. Or are they evasions? What I meant to say is that the salt in a Martian’s ear is inherently lyrical. But I don’t think you need me to tell you that. What was it you needed me for? Would you like me to tell you about pain? Pain is an indecent confusion that apparels us in lightning in the ancient gardens of the mind.

What a strange smell. Is that you? When one’s nerves are birds the world begins spinning. And smelling. You know that smell when you open a can of tuna? That’s the smell. It reminds me of fish and death and the merciless ambling of a black conviction spread by the paragraph of a dark, slow voice producing cleavage and oysters in a cocktail lounge somewhere in Alabama.

What’s your favorite emotion? Mine is ripping the sky apart and standing on a star outside of time.

It is the job of the house to mingle itself with cracks.

My understanding of Seattle has expanded to include Tangiers. This makes everything vertiginous and wide. I’ve never been overly fond of horizontality. There are horses in me that want the wide open spaces of a piece of paper. Anguish is just the flip side of oblivion. There’s a certain ooze that confirms this, and a stranger arriving in town whose eyes are evocations of pink. With a little spit and varnish he can be made to look like anybody, even Carl Sandburg.

It is the destiny of puppets to dangle from strings and climax in diphthongs. This is how I managed to arrive in Cincinnati just in time to rupture a scruple. I got tangled in my strings but when I discovered autonomy available in the G minor of a violin sonata by Franz Schubert I took full advantage and tripped lightly into an elevator that took me all the way to Point Hope, Alaska.

If all else fails, you can always rely on circumlocution. Some people call it bullshit. Me, I like to think of it as a random migration of thought trembling under a vast spectrum of improbability.

This is where the adjectives come in: gluttonous, exquisite, revitalizing, ebullient, jovial, carefree, playful, buoyant, and drastic. Everything The House of Destiny should be: open, aberrant, original, eccentric, bottomless, topless, immeasurable, peculiar, and odd.

 

 

My Weary Fulmination

I don’t mince words. I defend them with hysteria, my subscription to Hustler and a phosphorescence of Etruscan dots. I think of a tin kiss prolonging a structure of hamburger and realize that the scenery surrounding my life is slightly dodecaphonic, but otherwise sound as a discombobulation of cowboys in a Freudian discotheque. It is within the confines of our refrigerator that I draw true inspiration: infrared pickles and the curly drawing of a gallon of cross-eyed skim milk reposing in golden photoconductivity. The ice cubes are reveries of water and the cheese is totally retrospective.

I can’t wait to squeeze the grandeur of a lost opportunity. I will not use my sense of nothingness as an excuse. Buckle up, dude, we’re going places.

The vermilion altitude of my favorite tie interprets reality differently than I do. But I like to wear it anyway. It confers a certain authority on my chest that would otherwise be wasted on buttons. What do you think of those glasses and jars in Cézanne’s still lifes? I think they’re mighty with simultaneousness.

Today I got a job consolidating blisters in a pencil factory. But then I quit. I lasted ten minutes. Enough for a career, but not enough for a decent paycheck. Consequently, I had to take up boxing. I didn’t last very long at that either. I got a few punches in before the mattress collapsed to the floor.

Surrealism is my game, baby, but blossoming is my prerogative. Growling is an innocent luxury. And so I growl. GRRRRRR!!!

Suppose a funny indentation reached for a rattlesnake and lactated forty pounds of Chicago? Would you cry? Would you spit? Would you construct a simulacrum of life in an igloo? That’s what I did. And I managed to avoid Chicago completely.

A bunch of sunlight fell on my head while I was waiting to rent a furnished itch. My weary fulmination deepened into an amoebic decorum and I lost my head completely while tilting a subjective tortilla at a quixotic lump of sugar on a Platonic spoon. This is how to get tangled up in adjectives, my friend. My advice is to stay as close as you can to the coast of Greenland and then expand yourself into a relentless, hedonistic ball of fire.

Once you get your personality going you can always go to Montmartre. If you require the services of a subversive giant to bring you to the top you might want to bring a little extra cash. But make sure the giant is truly subversive and not just spilling his guts into a glass of wine.

Some days all I want to do is write poetry and get sexual with a planet. I’m aroused by orbits. I feel all the reticence of a peptic misanthrope but none of the adhesion. This is why I have trouble with bedsprings.

I wish I had never left California. I could’ve been a fingernail. Severity is so gaudy. The paint hangs from the painting ambushing a seashore and I have to wonder why I came to this motel in the first place. And then I remember: I became a conceit for shaving lather and dried my face with a car axle. I won’t do that again. Next time I’ll use a dishwasher.

Resort

I smell Plato. Wherever I go I smell Plato. My inner fire blazes with a higher reality. I fold it up and put it in a drawer. I go on my way. My sternum is as severe as a winter sky. I live in a skull of sugar which is placed on my shoulders like a story of labor and pain. Hair comes out of it. A goodly amount of it. Why, I don’t know why. If Great Britain takes umbrage with Amazon, who can blame them? This is why I’ve decided to go through life with a warehouse in my back pocket. Various personal injuries decorate my heart. I expand into eyes. I deposit pretzels in the Bank of Pretzels, as I was advised, by the King of Pretzels. I drift across a piece of paper leaving words behind my pen. The words get up and walk around. Nothing in life is ever truly incongruous. Therefore be glad and culminate in dots. Evade predictions. There is more to a chair than a chair. There are gnarls of wood and grain and shapes that snake through Tuesday bundled in glue and nails. So many subtleties are distinguished in dishwashing. There is a certain glamour in grammar. Red fingernails growing in reckless abandon. I’m held together by buttons and shoes. It helps to point these things out. Utopia wasn’t built in a day. By that I mean popcorn and cymbals. What is the harm in harmony? If I sound like a piano, will the diversities of life go on squeezing my lingerie? Identity is just another antagonism to appease. By this I mean babble, sparkle, and yearn. Really, just like reading. Open a book and there they are: words. Pronouns walking around dressed in adjectives. Does it worry you that silver is Italian? Buy a bathtub. You’ll see. Water is drunk with being water. Is that a door in your head, or just another eyebrow? The dime shines on the sidewalk calling out in miracles of bas-relief. I sense another reality clutching the trees and shaking them around. Some might call that wind. I call it the drool of twilight. When one journey ends another begins. The insects scatter and desire moves into the light awkward and romantic. The railroad is stunning. I long to hang from your lips discussing the monsters of late night TV. And no, I’m not a tuna. I dig the warm earth of Cubism. My intestines are pretty and fold around in the various colors of a sloppy but sensible convolution. The ghost of a dream inhabits my bassoon. It bangs around like a coat hanger because the escalator is thirsty. It prowls around the shopping mall dropping salads of sound and step by step transcends the floor. This is how it’s done, baby. The raw umber of being alive fattens the rodents and stipples the petition of sense in a cloud of nothingness. The result is a refrigerator in G minor, infrared pickles and a gallon of cross-eyed skim milk. I won’t deny the material world, no, but let’s face it: consolidating blisters in a pencil factory is just so much punctuation. It ain’t Chicago, dude. I have, however, changed my mind about chutney. Nobody’s odor should get in the way of sweating. Imagine Joan Baez in a T-shirt. Roll into a bistro whistling a zygodactyl ditty. Order some coffee. Sit down. Lift your cup and smell it. Smell the coffee. This is how things are done in the material world. The firmament lies down in the fog and nurtures a fertile anonymity, a lovely monotony, a kind of purity mixed with cocoa. Infinity dripping with hope. This is what I meant to say all along. I’m sad, not bitter. Just down a quart. All I ever wanted was to get out of this world. And here I sit: wandering around in my head like a ski resort.