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.