Hope is a Painter

Hope is a painter loading phenomena into a boat for a voyage across the River Styx. We see a passport dripping mosquitos. We see a grasshopper fart.

This is my mask. I’ve named it after Lake Purdy, Alabama. It’s my Purdy mask.

This is what it looks like: a dustpan with a vestigial tail and a persuasive idiosyncrasy.

If that doesn’t work, try the winch by the innocent yawn. Call it a house puff. A pocket. A mountain. It will move steadily and search for gold.

Imagine.

And entire mountain searching for gold. As if it didn’t have enough veins already.

I will let this idea fall like an anchor and grab the bottom and allow sufficient stability to incise a participle with an agrarian belief.

I have pulled the altitude of an Assyrian beard from an implication of words and plunged it in silence. I have embraced the raw highway of God’s longest shout. I have become a waterfall. I have become a reflection on a downtown window.

One must adapt to the world in the best way possible. Romance swallows everything. I rode an indicative across a dimension of lamentations until I came to a sea and listened to its waves mouth gnarls of wood.

I will oblige these insinuations until they become swans.

A greasy hostility matures into heartwood and becomes beautiful in its admonishments. We kiss behind the stepladder. The world continues to turn.

We hold the nipple of a wet feeling. We push it to the end of a sentence. It drops on the floor and clouds up into strange predictions.

A day will come when there is more to a chair than a chair.

Perhaps that day has come. My chair is a grammar of wood and finger joints.

Everything drips opinion. I encourage the planting of hyacinth.

Crabs refine our sense of space. I will verify my coordinates when I reach the summit of the next mountain. Meanwhile, let’s just sit in the park and watch the evening sky grow dark.

I like to feel water by swimming in it and drinking it and washing things with it. I do the same thing with my tongue. I toss it into sentences where it learns to ponder the imponderable.

People get irritated and walk away. That’s ok. I have your attention, at least for now.

I like feeling anonymous and moody, like a rhythm, or an escalator. How about you? What lights up your gaze?

The intensity of the dawn breaks my eyes. My pain flutters in the breeze like the ghost of a clarinet. I’m undone by even the mention of braids. I left the oars in the boathouse. We’ll just have to spend the rest of this sentence drifting. It was originally intended to go somewhere.

Let’s just say not all ambitions feed on bugs and puzzles. I don’t go to the opera. I am an opera.

Can we leave it at that? How will it sound when the sounds flow through this sentence expecting conquest at the end? I see the insects scatter. A thousand themes enliven the frogs of Texas, but I don’t know what any of them mean, and that makes the world beautiful.