The Occurrence of Sadness and Glass

Whatever phantom slides through you pay it no mind. The dead are everywhere. It takes effort to fully occupy a living body. Each experience is an egg to break, the glop of its yolk spilling out as one glistening nucleus. It’s finding that nucleus that’s difficult.

Age is a thorny plant. Look for a hiatus, a rupture in the fabric of time, and occupy that. It’s easiest to find those places in art. Places which are non-places because they don’t exist in linear time or three-dimensional space.

If you fold a piece of tin into a placenta you will acquire a Technicolor hammer. It won’t be a real hammer, a hammer that you can use to pound nails. It will be a metaphorical hammer, a hammer that you can use to build similes. A house like a grape. A hat like an artichoke.

I see two eyes in the rain. Later, I see the sky lying on the ground. I pick it up. I tie it into three hundred knots and exchange it for a pair of boots and a birch canoe. This is the sort of thing you can do in language that you cannot do in normal life.

Falling down is a maniacally brilliant sensation if it’s done correctly. Of course, it has to be a complete accident. How do you plan an accident? You don’t. Accidents plan you.

If writing happens by accident the words will overflow their margins and tumble over the rocks of an imagined envy. For example, how old is Robert Redford? Sip the elegance of cider from a crystal glass and answer quickly. The answer is a red dream with a savory tang crawling across a piece of paper weeping tears of iron. This has nothing whatever to do with Robert Redford and so it is correct.

If I’m being excessively resplendent it’s because life is full of headlights and syllables. Life cries effervescence at the disciplinarians. We bring our more serene behavior to the bank and feed it money. The walls echo with my criticism. Money is too complex, too sentimental. Money should be serious, like dereliction.

Cézanne stirs a lot of emotion. I throb like a monster to see such color, such shape. I dream of a museum full of steam and sorcery. I see a Blob with a voice and meanings which froth into Kuiper belts of astronomical vertebrae. I have a neck full of light and an arm full of circulation. Each time something sublime happens I glitter like an area code.

Large ambiguities rescue us from idealism. It feels pervasive, like a pumpkin. I walk down the road looking for a job. I specialize in irritation. I wear gloves of oak and an alternating current. I get a job folding napkins into whispers. I stumble over a sentence teeming with words and fold it into a beautiful collision. This involves tuna, honeysuckle, and a tiny fork. My lobster eyes pull a world of color out of a solitary potato. This is how things are done around here. Circularly. There are things that cry for diameter and circumference and a little cherry pi.  

Emotion is a cherry whose charm murmurs sociability. That’s what emotion is for, largely. The sky hammers the ground with rain and thunder. And at the end of the day, the sky drags the night over the mountains, the train starts to roll, and social instincts awaken the occurrence of sadness and glass.