Thank You Space

I feel the need to thread some words through an eyeball. I lament the literality of the world. I miss the significance of glistening. An invisible power crawling out of a gray sky. The wonder of it. Shelley’s poem about it. I like decorations, too. Headlights on Christmas Eve. Fog and angels. Winter splashed against my forehead. The metaphor is a brocade, an appurtenance purged of embarrassment. The chair corroborates its mahogany. I can feel it. It’s stunning to mull on it. I dive into books. The room roams in quest of itself. There are trousers in the closet. But who says ‘trousers’ anymore? The shadow of a preposition wrinkles with hunger. It’s only natural to sit and wonder about such things among your clothes. This is what introversion was invented for. That, and philosophy, which is nothing like cactus. And yet, somehow, everything like cactus. There is a dissonance there that flames revelation. As soon as we grant an interior, we discover chiaroscuro. We find the right horizons, the ones that go on forever, just beneath the thumb. No universe is exact. Even the escalator insinuates a species of wilderness. Imperfection is the spring in the mattress, the one that squeaks a little, as it accepts the weight of the body. It’s the past that’s impenetrable, that eludes our substitutions. The paragraph operates by sprockets. No worry there. Just the usual mythologies eloping with halibut. I tried using a bulldozer for the salt, but to no avail. I climbed into some music and expanded my interest in elbows. How they bend, how they feel when you lean on them while sitting at some extraordinary table. Words are made of air. Air is breath. Breath is life. Therefore we swim in sound, shining and trembling when we reach the other shore. Everything is so malleable that malleability brightens in understanding, inspiring a lap dance or two. I will never know quite what to say about the waterfall. How it got here. What it’s doing here. How it suddenly emerged into consciousness. But there it is, falling over that edge of rocks, thundering, spraying, dropping to the river below, which is just what happens, thanks to gravity, thanks to space.

Cuff Link

There’s a grandeur in a cuff link. You have to look for it, but it’s there. The sheen of the cuff link coincides with the luster of the violin and suggests a certain decorum. The violin and the cuff link are all about decorum. The syzygy sizzles in zithers. I can see Paris in the distance. Its arrival trembles on the paper. This is called furniture.

There has been a lot of rain lately. The river is flooding its banks. I say this in relation to wood carving, which has its own logic, its own laws and ways of doing things, and whose chips collect at the base of the steps. There is just enough clay in the world to mimic the shipwreck of truth on the banks of experience, but not enough to duplicate the ingenuity of spring. Only yesterday did I see a man walk down the street in a bathrobe carrying a Technicolor headache.

I feel the presence of a certain plaster. My right arm is a proverb. My left arm is an elevator. Together we accomplish farms and juggle hairdryers.

Fossils are treasured for conversation. They hide in postage stamps, attracting stepladders and Mediterranean odysseys. I feel the same way about embroidery as I do about sweatshirts. The Grateful Dead were no ordinary rock group. Their butter pulsed with a better dream than the grommets of gastronomy.

Which is why there’s no guided tour today. I think, instead, I will practice the drums and study concrete. I don’t know why I do the things that I do. Elegance has its own oils. Behavior cries for expansion. The representation of a misunderstanding argues in favor of plumage and space. All misunderstandings are beautiful because they lead to philosophy.

Abstraction comes with its own set of exigencies. Which is why the life of the philodendron is so fat with heaven.

It’s not just the ocean, it’s the general idea of fins. You can see it in the eyes of the fish. They seem always so casually surprised and conscious of little else but their own movement. This is why I’m so attracted to them as metaphors. They’re so natural. They carry the mystery of their life in a milieu of water like words in the milieu of a sentence. The milieu contains them, but not completely. The boundary between sky and water is indeterminate. A school of fish inhabit the dream of movement in surges of unpredictable movement. Whatever the thought the words convey, their theme is never static, but seethes in unending sequence.

Fire sweetens the air with heat. I’ve never met Joan Jett but I imagine she’s quite nice. Why is it always so exciting to meet musicians? Perhaps because they know how to bend space. The strongest songs are sometimes sung by a gentle voice. Beowulf, for instance. There are great delicacies there. One feels the compression of the words in the chaos of the mead hall.

Elsewhere in the world insects, constitutions, and wheelbarrows pulse with fanfare. English priests wander in the fog. Samuel Beckett buys Grendel a beer at the Deux Magots. The rain walks backwards down the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Personally, if I had to make a choice, I’d go for the pumpernickel. As for propellers, it should be obvious: they arouse a love of form.

Dada Budapest

Infinity solicits our ears to assist in the worship of latex. We walk in exhibition of ourselves, comfortable in our structures of sound, living in the full evidence of our fingers, coaxing meaning out of mud and interacting with the sirens as they lure us further into the poem of life. The journey begins with a hot wet kiss and ends with a defiant hoop skirt. The miles in between are long and argumentative but the darkness stirs the blood and the stripes in the center lane are a confection of pigments and synthetic resin. The gravel at the side of the road is more like crockery than fruit, but tastes of science, a multitude of atoms fused into one dominating impression of words and whispers of rain. It is why I must consider the heat of this moment as a flame bundled together to make a cloth. It is obvious that physical science is an abstraction, but to say this and nothing more would be a confession of philosophic failure which I, for one, am not prepared to make. If you think how you fold things you will see what I mean. Abstractions smell of consciousness, especially at these higher elevations, where the wildflowers shout their names. The truck is old but runs like a top. We enter Dada Budapest moistened by paraffin. It isn’t Nebraska. It’s more like navigating a bubbly ear with a beautiful finger. There are feathers in the toolbox, and themes of redemption, which are good for hanging curtains. If I strain to describe my belt I discover a form of geometry crawling over itself in reckless abandon. I’m held together by shoes, like most people, but sound like a piano if someone gets too close to my paddle. Let’s face it, art isn’t always as hospitable as you might think. Have you ever tried buying a bathtub at the Home Depot? How did that enterprise get started, anyway? And when did Dada become so emphatic as to deserve an entire city? This is how I’ve learned to bare myself upon impact. When endurance meets popcorn the result is a stepladder. I’ve been pregnant before, but not with a paragraph. Unfolding it has been surprisingly round, like the dome of a skull reposing on a block of ice. I feel the friction of life during the intuition of screws. This happened in a crustacean, once, and the result was wood. Everything velvet stands erect. I salute the presumption. There is this silk to wear, have you heard of it? It gets hazy when you pull it over your head and then stimulates conversation as it unites with the bed linen. Somebody said that’s a symptom of depression and I opened it and found a horse. I clasped the wind to my breast and crushed a nearby sob with a flick of my gland. Which gland, I’m not saying. Let’s just say it has something to do with propulsion. Who doesn’t like the west coast of Ireland? Is that all you can say? Retire on your own terms. Periodically, I like to sparkle when no one is expecting it, and the hit songs that once made life squirt with stereophonic glee are now all understood as knobs, or Indian paintbrush.

 

 

The Cloud

The cloud is equally mist and motion and shape. The carving skidoodles and this becomes a sentence giving a hypothesis life as a suggestion, that is to say coffee, which is a beverage, which is a tongue of the moment, which is a metaphor, which is a path on the skin. Harmony and eating are also bubbly. There’s no easy definition for night. Gambling does not lead to redemption, no, but it will lead to flames of retaliation. The paragraph rolls by on rails. Symptoms include glue, desire, correlation, and trout. There is more light in a wrinkle than you can imagine if you look closely in a mirror you will find a face of water exhibiting an impersonal glow. I will dote more on glue. I will grant that I have an interior walking among my drugs. It’s by soaring through red the mimes will come to understand us. But if we heave ourselves into abstraction the many lives carved out of the mountain have the flavor of syntax combined with the color of ice cubes, which is a kind of non-color, or ghostly vibration of milk. I don’t sneer at wrestling, I was once a wrestler myself, but I do not think that nailing a noun to a description of henna will result in anything like a philosophy. Anything written down is mentally viable, can be pictured, can be imagined, can be extruded from the mouth at a social gathering and writhe in the air like a deep prodigal thumb or ugly towel. I’m eager to enrich this thought with an insinuation involving bedsprings and rocks. Eyebrows forest the forehead for a reason. Don’t take sideburns lightly. Elvis didn’t, and look what happened to him. High collars, rhinestones, and Vegas. The mind is a funny form of energy, a rodent running a treadwheel, the chatter of rodeo clowns at a winter ski resort. People don’t normally associate revelation with the streets of Chicago, a violent place to be sure, but also a simulacrum, a parallel to hair. The sparks are a gift from John Lennon. It’s time now to search for a little grace at the airport. Nothing melts faster than ice on the wing of a plane readying for takeoff. Music solicits my ears in a dream and penumbra surrounding my buttons acts all Technicolor and hands, like the sympathy of swimming when there is granulation and taxis. That makes trumpets come into mint and jingle in truancy. I can’t say enough about eggnog. I must go now and make some wings to extol the etiquette of opinion.

I'll Be Honest

I’ll be honest, I’m not shy when it comes to getting wet. Sometimes I’m a boat, sometimes I’m the ocean. Writing brings out the punctuation in me. Nutmeg argues the existence of prose. Attachment is a major feature of the human condition and its inevitable counterpart, loss, is implied in the grin of the ogre at the end of the fairy tale and all the rakes have been put back in the garage and leaned against the wall in their proper position. This is why we plant things. Mass gargles space like a delivery truck. Liberty doesn’t depend on ovaries, just childbirth, but let’s not minimize the boil of mosquitoes in that hot Midwestern air.

The mind burns to ash in its cage of bone and makes a perfect bed for thought.

Who doesn’t prefer the purgatory of autumn to the fireworks of summer?

There’s a fatal clarity in the colors of desire. There’s no map for experience, but there are plenty of detours.

For example, if you push the age of a potato to the edge of a clock you can call it a deviation and pump it full of pockets and let it stir among the Jacobins and nothing happens except butter. The poem stands among its sounds insoluble and buggy and remedies the blandishment of granite with perpetual emergencies. I know what it means to be Euclid I once abandoned a sandwich for an incumbency in a brood of consonants. There’s no form of electricity that doesn’t require a lyrical response.

We see the Muse waving to us in the distance. We wonder what is intended. Should we come closer? Wave back? Write something?

Desire tosses its mane. The hills strain to make a point. Muscles explode into walking, feeling, becoming immense and metaphoric. And so we let it all happen. We groan at our chains and invoke the gods.

What gods? Are there any gods out there?

A few. There is the god of the goad, the god of the good, and the god of the gob.

Gobs of god.

Someone asks, but what about morality? Morality is stupendous, I agree, but its roots must be nourished by the tears of clarinets, and there are only so many clarinetists in the world.

It takes a yardstick and a glockenspiel to make a proper emotion. But what’s a proper emotion? Emotions are improper by nature. Nature is inherently improper.

There are only improper emotions, and beer and pretzels.

Gymnastics advance the podiatry of violinists. Everyone needs a stance. Some of us need a stampede.

Iron, on the other hand, is an agency of considerable weight. I don’t know why I mention this, except as an aside, and to make an appeal for the sombrero. Nothing slams louder than the door of an angry woman. All my adaptations to this planet have been slow in the making. There are things I just don’t get. Hence, the appeal of writing. Writing helps provide a semblance of control. But what a joke that is. History teaches us that the duodenum plays a significant role in the development of free will. Exploration is baldly Epicurean. And here is where I fell into the magic of dry cleaning.

We all like to hang upside down and ruminate. I do, at least. If I can find something to support my body I’ll defy gravity and think about ways to avoid thinking.

Thinking at all.

Imagine a ring of bone. Then imagine the hole in the ring of bone. That’s precisely the sentiment that I want to have in my head. But as soon as I get a hole in my head the hole fills up with stuff. And so it begins: micturition.

There are drugs for micturition, but let’s not get into that. This doesn’t become a problem until much later in age when marriage and propellers unite in the jaw of the universe as a form of endless expression. The wind goes on talking and the odors clasp your nose and swing it into burlap. That’s when you know you’re on the verge of something, something vague and lyrical, something like poetry, something like a ring of bone, something with steady parallels and trickles of words describing the flaws in the glass, the voice in the kerosene released at last.

Sleeves of Grass

I shiver to every breeze and to floating charcoal. Nobody’s smell the elbow slams is grease. I’m elbows. The water fusses over bohemia on the door. The apple tree blooms over rattles, a world like snow. I lament the loss of introspection beneath a monument to industry. We age in participles like a dream of shells, the wonder of it green, so green that to elevate windows is a help to consider fog and angels. I have a drawing of a coin inscribed with the formula for Vicodin. Write your name below and I will send you a description of fog. It will be garnished with radar and taste like a chair. I’m extending my crowd to a stove. This means I’m feeling sanguine and my words are filled with heat. There are trousers in the closet and the morning has been folded by hospital hermits. The shadows of Paris produce electricity. There are coordinates beside the pepper. It doesn’t help to argue with a worry. The worry will win. Just walk away. And take your worry with you. I’m going on a tour of Alabama. I experience science as a serendipitous snake inside the parenthesis of a dead sentence. The sentence died because nobody read it. It came alive when it was pumped with the details of a grasshopper and resurrected in reading. Somebody read it. It must've been read. I can hear it groan under the weight of its own existence as it strains to make itself understood. It moves now, word by word, remembering and thinking. It plunges into its own diversions. This is how we know that the savor of mayonnaise incarnates the tangle of the mind. This is how we know that there even is a tangle of the mind. This is how the silk of listening necessitates thought. This is how consideration becomes a waterfall and dreaming walks among these words in a gown of opacity. Philosophy joins me in swallowing reality. Each time that I shave or iron a shirt I discover a sack of helium in my head falling like snow on a river. The river is a gift of variation illumined by forty-two light bulbs in a whipped cream cartoon. It keeps the lips moving. I fold what I need to fold and put the rest in storage. I find consciousness has the power to bubble when there's enough cement around to build a geometry of wheels and traffic cones. Life is often sticky with play. Suppose gold. Dollop monstrosity. There’s a hint of introversion in all of us. This may be of some use on a picnic. Physiology occurs when eating is happening. Tuna is nothing like cactus. But I do like swimming. There is the phenomenon of pulling a paper sun to translate grass. The grass is interwoven with air. It makes sense to forge a relationship with the things of earth. I’m gambling on the planet to dote on its own circumlocution. There are some pains that can be a little amusing at times, especially when the currents move toward chiaroscuro in the evening.

Weather Report

The weather hurries to validate Euclid. And because it’s autumn, we have all agreed to the counsel of garlic. The Cubism of Picasso, Braque and Léger completed what Cézanne had begun. This helps explain why Picasso, Léger and Braque were able to profit from their sensations and analyze every part of every motif into its smallest negotiable plane, just like the weather. Just like Cézanne. My palette sizzles with birds and chisels. I feel needles of turpentine. I thirst for rivets. These things are difficult to explain. Sensations, in general, are hard to explain. Nerves are words without syllable or sound. The brain is a great auditorium where the litter of dreams echo with the singing of little girls. I would have to crawl under your skin to feel what you feel. But would your sensations continue to be your sensations or would they then become my sensations? Maybe we should just go see a movie.

I like being connected. If anyone is stabbed during a performance the effect is remarkable. I’m referring, of course, to mind and matter. “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.” We are often unified in disagreement. This should tell you something. This morning my horse abandoned me for a bikini filled with four hundred breasts. I went to the airport to search for its source. All I found was the fourth dimension and a demure gorilla colonizing an asymmetrical mood. I find it intriguing that the shine of an amoeba can reverse the opinion of a little smallpox.

Singing permits the personalization of pain. Doesn’t it? Is that what you wanted to know? I forget. Apart from that, which gives you the greatest pleasure, nipples or bones?

You’re welcome to clean the apartment if you want. I get a little sweaty around clay and must often suppress the urge to crawl and reproduce. Openly exposed genitalia make people uncomfortable. They get the wrong idea. But you have to admit there’s something inherently lyrical about skin, the way it wrinkles, its ingenuous warmth  and enveloping anticipation. You don’t often find that kind of sincerity in the brain. That’s an entirely different organ with an entirely different dominion. It may explain why I smell pumpernickel and apples every time I sit down to exalt the history of denim.

The oak tree stands in the autumn afternoon enduring and solid while the clouds go riding by on the sexual air swollen and incandescent in hedonistic rapport with a streetcar named Agog.

Doorknobs, it’s true, are gripping. But there exist, as always, anomalies, and not all doorknobs open doors. Sometimes they exist plainly to fascinate the eyes with saleswomen. You can sense it in Mallarmé. Not all the swans are white. Sometimes they assume the color of forceps, while others are adorned in the colors of the spinal cord.

If you’d like to know more about Cubism, a trail of madder red leads to the Bateau-Lavoir.

When things go wrong, a mockingbird is better than a glove. Butterflies embody the souls of the dead. Everybody knows that. But how many people does it take to pull the wool over the head of a loud parameter? And what exactly is a parameter? Is a parameter a perimeter? Or is it more like an ablative with a backyard patio?

I respect the toss of the mouth. And I like the way the tide pool speaks to the orchestra about the fable of the banished hypotenuse. Charles Ives stood riveted by the use of stucco. We stayed for the cherries although their shadows had already been put in storage. And one of the violins crawled out of itself to find a more satisfying apotheosis in absinthe.

Yes, I do have intestines. They sound like convolutions of golden football.

Nothingness wrinkles in the hills, but that sounds different. That sounds processional, like the stars.

Remember Euclid? He sounds like that too.

Anytime there is a structure around I can smell it. For example, the indicative smells like a calliope. Sex is a burning smell. There are those who say that sex doesn’t have a structure, that it’s all impulse and instinct and messy bedsheets, but this isn’t necessarily the case. One might also consider the bedsprings, the placing of the telephone, and the hang of the curtains. Some like Brahms. Some prefer the Rolling Stones. Brahm’s clarinet quintet in B minor can be effectively performed underwater, but it will not smell like an opportunity, if that’s what you’re hoping for. Opportunities don’t have smells. They just strut around in peacock feathers auditioning for chins.

There’s a reason that air was invented. Without air, what would the weather do? All those hurricanes and typhoons would go to waste. All those troubles, all those dances. All those nouns soaked in faith.

Faith and Hollywood.

Ghosts.

Nouns.

Coils.

The tension inherent in cloth. The stroll of a cat across a keyboard. The masks people wear when the engines sputter and the race is about to begin. Everyone gazing south, where a bank of clouds moves in, hideous and veined with expectation.