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.