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.