Bruegel Bone

Gravity thickens with mass just as words do

When cotton is to cloth what squeezing is

A recruitment thickening with meat

That sells for a dollar at the local emotion

Spirit and color walking in bone. There

Is a power within us that will chirp its way

To Scotland with a drug on its shoulder

All dreamy and soft. You can hear it

In the rain as it strains to make itself

Multifarious like Ted Berrigan’s sonnets

The turmoil is in the house, which is lousy

With mushrooms and haggis. Surely

An axle is as wet as its veins. It was all sidewalks

Then breaking and imagery in the wind

Thudding through the trees like a theory

Mutating into thought. I just am. I’m

Serious as candy. The reason for aging is wrinkles

And unresolved emotional issues. I also have

A rapier. This is for remembering and thinking

I like puddles not puzzles. I like the idea

Of playing a harmonica more than actually

Playing a harmonica. This is good for me, good

For you. Before the journey ends I just want

To kiss you all over and say what a joy it has been

To ride through the laundromat on a comet

Aching and romantic, a saga of unfocussed rage

Enough, at least, to inspire a pharmaceutical

The sunlight likes you too you know you should

Go on a pretty migration through space

Talking about snow and the odor of elephants

There is a mythology of absorption in the way

It is written with a garden hose I feel all thick

And bubbly now and intend to cause art. This is how

Consciousness bounces around. We put a little

Thought into it and as soon as the enamel is shaped

Like a knock at the door, there’s a quiet solemn group

Of hunters returning in the snow

A Viking Wrinkles

A Viking wrinkles

In black boots and steepness

Is implicit in the stitches

Of a woman squeezing a sponge

I like butter it’s true it improves

Everything especially scrambled eggs

Gaudy as the misunderstanding

Of coffee. When did you ever

Completely understand this beverage?

Tea has a delicacy that doesn’t fit

The rage of the morning and its awkwardness

Rubbing against the hair of the leg

With all the muscle it can muster

I’m throwing an idea at you let me know

When it arrives. I’m learning how to feel

My arms as I hold a stack of books

We answer the call of our skin this way

Circle ourselves with the colors

Of consciousness and take care of the personality

In its interactions with the world. My forehead

Glitters with violins when the wind blows through it

Poetry is the mushroom growing beside the rock

Is this the right spoon for this emotion? Or should I use

A knife? Dive into books. Slither through the words

They mean what you want them to mean, so work them

Into agglutination. This is what ganglions are for

We initiate ourselves in cocoons, enter them as

Ideas and come out as airplanes. Don’t sneer

At ears. I tell this to all my friends

I seek depth in understanding. And drink coffee

In the light of my anarchy. I want to be social

But when I’m in conference with a ghost

I just want to dawdle at the table until the waitress

Brings me more coffee. Honey it’s the same

As the spaces between the bars that keep

The tiger caged and the words are splendid

When the nerves release them

Here I Am Stirring the Senses

Here I am stirring the senses

And listening to the Rolling Stones

As they once existed in England

Now you always say that you want to be free

But you’ll come running back to me

Coiled into introversion the way I found you

There’s an engine beside the syntax

Of a river causing it to arrange itself

In funny currents and giants of garlic and thorn

Scattering itself into oars where the mockingbird

Sings and the threads are heavenly. Equilibrium

Feels good. Doesn’t it? Balance yourself

On a line of poetry and consider the light

Of the candle. We only bring them out when

The wind tears through the shitty infrastructure

Of this city and causes a power outage. Things

Get romantic quickly. Out come the candles

And quills and the skin itches with all the toxins

Inside the body that want to come out and express

Themselves as ideas. Well, what’s an idea? Can you

Tell me? When the elevator arrives and the door

Opens do you sometimes expect to see angels

Discussing Cubism? Use your biology to top

The similarity of violins. There’s got to be strings

In this world or the music will just hang

In the air like a universe. The weight of this

Emotion is anonymous and bubbles

As I crawl across the floor looking for my impact

On society. I know it’s here someplace

I know a good magician when I see one

Saw a woman in half and accelerate the noise

Of my skin. Syntax squeezes the water as it glides

Over my head like a big idea of spectacular perspective

And all I can do is offer you a sonnet giving birth

To an evergreen shaking in the wind like a garage

That later turns gray in the mind and real

As the imagery of heaven on a coin of jelly

Chuck Berry's Sideburns

Dissonance heaves its guts

Provides us with delectation

What a strange world this is

In which everything dies

Of envy and desire. What I need

Is to despair of ever finding an answer

And that will be the answer

The knife does not exist

Without an edge. Sometimes I think

I will and sometimes I think I won’t

This is why I prefer to go dark

And slow and grow wings out of my

Shoulder blades. I don’t expect

To go around sullen all the time

We older folks have to show the young

How to swerve into the landscape

Get off the main road and stand

On the stars. If a heat pierces your heart

Use it to cook an affection

Fall in love with cement

You may not use arithmetic

To chatter with poetry but the poetry

Will get you one way or another

Jump into a tuna Joan Baez in a T-shirt

There’s blood in your veins

Stitched together by ghosts

Ice cubes postulate the light of eternity

In tiny bubbles that sparkle

This is all mentally viable if you

Exasperate the logic of time

With the speedometer of the mouth

This is called concentration

It is how you will feel when you’re naked

In a beautiful raw umber with the density

Of Chuck Berry’s sideburns and your love

Is great and the morning shines and the nerves

Burn for a music to feed that heat 

Tell Me What It's LIke

Tell me what it’s like

To slap a Byzantine insistence

Into definition. You know? So that

I can understand it. The thrust

Of the alligator into the river

Is nothing less than a parable

Of itself looking for dinner

But what I meant to say is acoustical

Like the pulse of a violet sky

Dripping from my brain. The hand

Is evidence of fingers, but the squeeze

Of my arms around you is meant

To convince you that I like you

A lot and if I see a bug play a concertina

I will tell you about it with bells

And innuendo. I will suckle the light

From a headlight and make love to you

While gravity thickens around us

In prophecy and the world spins

Into Wednesday which is my favorite

Day of the week except for Thursday

Friday and Saturday. Monday is damaged

By walking around on Sunday

Waiting to happen. And Sunday

Is obviously unconcerned. Once

I heard a pharmaceutical occur

To my body and fill my mind

With abstraction. It made me want

To write you a letter and hang

Upside down. Someday I hope

To fill a kiss with your lips

Entangled in a thousand themes

Of reckless abandon. Watch me sway

With the wind. I like to float around

In my head like a world but does it

Have a jaw of gold? No but it squirts fog

Like a metaphor assembled for winter

Little Love Valves

I’ve had it with folding laundry. I’d rather seduce a push-up. Last night I saw Guillaume Apollinaire attack a wall and leave it trembling with closets. This inspired me. Even the drummers were nervous. But the drums, the drums were colossal. They gnashed at the air with sticks. Insights marched into representations of envy. We viewed the world differently. Everything seemed, suddenly, to exhale parentheses. Quiet intervals of private debauchery. Yodeling is now all the rage. This is how writing happens. A novel crawls into itself and percolates improbability. The density is large and red. Volume and area are frequented by pronouns. The pronouns behave irresponsibly and so bring about a state of crisis groaning with gasoline. Sparkling accommodates the cuticles of a river. Chronology collapses on itself. The narrative moves cautiously, slowly, like a high-wire funambulist crossing an abyss in a strong wind. For some reason this makes me think of sandpaper. The smell of a mahogany bar after spending an entire day rubbing it with sandpaper.

Picasso, for example, compensated for his lack of tactile feeling by drawing in air. That is, by constructing instead of modeling or yodeling.

The term “constructed” is how the Cubists were able to repair the damage done by the Impressionists.

And this is how I came to discover the certitude of mass in Puerto Rico. Hippies chewing water, magnolia leaves enveloping the attention of a Pomeranian.

You think I’m kidding? I’m not. Imagine a family of four grown men, one in bed with a sore throat, one dressed as an astronaut, one repeatedly tossing a baseball into a catcher’s mitt, and one with smallpox scars rehearsing for Hamlet. Life is seldom simple, and misleading evidence for William Huggins’s theory of nebulae being composed of luminous gas obscure our view of other galaxies. Banish Falstaff, but do not banish space.

I like propellers too much not to consider them as somehow allegorical.

Power, on the other hand, is essentially osteopathic. All the crustaceans scatter when I slam the door. I will, therefore, expand my activities to include sculpture and photosynthesis.

Everything changes when I choose to see the world in chiaroscuro. The immediate environment assumes an air of pagan urgency. I can embody an airport and dive for ancient Phoenician sweaters. I have a wild green tie that gallops across my chest like an expressway and a convocation of buttons I affectionately call my “little love valves.” None of this proves the existence of salt, but merits careful attention with a lemon-squeezer. The sky falls to the ground and breaks into a thousand knobs of luminous falsetto. What can go wrong?

I will admit that I prefer cellophane to aluminum foil. There’s a certain sorcery in the insistence of rain that speaks to my affinity for afterthought. Afterthought is vastly superior to forethought because Shelley’s Mont-Blanc creates an image of sublimity that continually hypostatizes an eternity of human consciousness. Forethought only reminds us to buy some laundry detergent.

For example, I can endure a parody of mathematics if it pulses with envy. Give me a shovel and I will dig for substitutes. This is how we come to discover that empire is soaked in ovals. And yes, I believe that the world is a fingerprint. How else can you explain the bounciness of pronouns, or the velvet underlining of a waterfall?

The map, they say, is not the territory. I get it. But isn’t it all a matter of corduroy and glue? Mountains exalt the twist of the highway. But the sugar puzzles our tongues with the candor of its sweetness, the multiplicity of its grains, the sensations exploding into symposiums of spectral congeniality the way elves do when they bounce through infinity enlivening the temperature of hindsight or get serious and determined and hammer chimerical ores out of hermetic Norwegian mines or get impromptu and wayward and descend booming furious rivers, drunk and exuberant, wild seething spumescences of locomotive actuation pushed hot and obvious into the sounds of Jack Kerouac’s teletype. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Words on a train. Acoustical, desperate, and strange.

 

 

Ghostly Horizon

There is a silk to listening. It’s a fine sensation. Words glide over the ears. Enter them sweetly in mild conversation. We live in a world of sensation. Snow and paper. Words pressed into paper with a pen. Light presses the face in August. Desires swarm in crisis like a circus. Acrobats catching one another. Horses riding sawdust plumed and muscular. Time thickens into raspberries, blackberries, textures crowded with shapes. There are contraptions available for space, rockets and cars. My personal space is filled with engines of personal prayer. I like to gather all the words I can find in the air and let them fall on your head. Can you feel them? Trickling down like the meat of an egg. Listen to the vowels of night. Listen to them seep into consonants and become delicate things, divine things, paraphernalia, diagrams, reality and its climates, its obstetrics and eyebrows, hunger and turnstiles. Let’s call it a milieu of bone. Of blood. Of sounds fossilized in abstraction. Fingers in a fist of ceremony. Cries of secretion. Intestines on a ceiling. The nightmare that is a job. That crushing boredom endured for money. Ok. Let’s not get to deep into politics. Do birds think of their feathers as equipment? I doubt it. Must be a terrific sensation to lift oneself into the air by flapping wings. Wonder how it feels if the joints get sore. Those old crows especially. The ones that look back at you with jaded eyes. Yes, I’m old. But I can still fly. Watch this. Flap, flap, flap. And he’s gone. But look: the world is secure in its grandeur. The thrashing of science, endless tubes and experiments, labyrinths and tests, dynasties of empirical thought grappling with the vertigo of eternity. Consciousness is exhausting. That’s why we have drugs. And food. Let’s take food: is food a drug? I feel a little addicted to eating. Put me anywhere near chocolate and I’m in serious trouble. Conflicted or fat. One of the two. Which is why I haven’t been to Scotland yet. It’s not the chocolate. It’s the whiskey. I know I’d feel compelled to go on tour drinking everything in sight. Again, it’s worth repeating, consciousness is exhausting. Shoving it onto paper is amusing sometimes. When experience gets organized into language it seems, I don’t know, like spatulas hanging in a kitchen. Velvet and lingerie. German is ponderous, isn’t it? That’s a heavy language. Not like French. French is nimble and light. More like water. It flows. Meanders. Reflects. Glitters back at the sun with hallucinatory jewels. Huge corridors filled with mirrors. Cultured pearls. I like it when the flowers agree to amuse us with their elegance and embroidery. The words traveling through my nerves are swollen, engorged with meaning and passion. I’m almost afraid to open my mouth and let them out. Certain veins of thought offer tricky diversions. I chip at the bas-relief of my pullulation and go wild. I will not impose this weight on you. Let’s just lean back and enjoy the autumn. Cook some noodles and watch them swirl. Just like words. Listen: the water is boiling. I can say anything now. I won’t pull back. I’ll dive right in. Honor these abstractions with toil. Montmartre and metaphysics. Construct a morning with the blood in my veins and stitch it to some ghostly horizon.

Feral Words

The signs employed in propositions are called rudders. They steer the mind, which would otherwise drift aimlessly, as it might do in an airport, or law office.

There are medications available for ataraxia, eudaimonia, euthymia, and upekkhā. The key word is for. These are medications in support of euphoric solutions to the nettles and thorns of life and appear in a variety of forms: ecstasy, codeine, dithyramb, dada. 

Most of my medication has a coefficient similar to Holland, which is why I’ve chosen to go through life explaining facelifts to the faithful and plunge my fingers into strange anatomies. Sometimes I grip the light in my hands dreaming of the heraldry of stars. But most of the time I stand around trembling like a soy bean. The mazurka deepens my appreciation of milk. I feel perforated and evident.

Happily there is a farm where we can dig for potatoes and become real men. I have a map of China and can run circles around a rusty sabbatical. Even the railroad flirts with abstraction from time to time. When the storm arrives we can elope. I’ve fallen in love with a clock. It’s a broken clock, but what does that matter? Time is an illusion. Let the local architecture thunder in solemn approval. There’s more to sketching a bewildered psychoanalysis than embarrassing a glove compartment with last minute propositions.

I search for power in the folds of a hog. Later I ruminate on the quantity of sweat this produces and lean over the balcony to study the crowd. A flock of words raises the highway from a delirious libido and puts it into a lithograph. The question is, whose words? Are these feral words? Are these the words of an aleatory abstraction or do they belong to a rogue arousal?

Let us suppose that the spine is a spiral staircase and that the lumber destined for paradise is pure dogma. Does this mean that states can be described but not named?

Yes.

I get the measles whenever I think about woodbine. You don’t know how sensitive I am. Pretty women torture me with hope. Yesterday I had my stitches removed. The sublime bends my blood into a speedboat. I’ve grown feathers. Meanwhile the Druids forage for old Beatles records. I stroll the waterfront enveloped in a solemn socialism. Even the gargoyles complement my exquisite grumpiness.

It is said, in these regions, that the structures of propositions stand to one another in internal relations. I have no reason to doubt this. Life scratches itself whenever it’s near a railroad. I say life as if it were my next door neighbor. Life is very close to me. I think, in many ways, that it is life that causes my fingers to itch and burn whenever I hold a proposition in my cupped hands and feel its little heart beat with controversy.

The world is the whole world. There is nowhere else to go. If Robert De Niro doesn’t make you feel better, I don’t know what to say. You might try licorice.