We Are This Sensation That Keeps Happening

How many people live in your heart? I have a population of two million. My back hurts. I’m stuck in this position until my mind spreads its wings and I leave the earth and remember the power of my grandfather’s coffee. Most of my narratives include at least one accordion but this time I’m going to insert a slice of cherry pie and the dream of a silver moon. We are this sensation that keeps happening, you and I, because we’re alive and that’s what happens when you’re alive, you grow a periscope or you don’t, and I mean that in its most metaphorical sense. I like to explain how things work but this time I’m just going to back away and let things happen on their own. Think of this as water running through a hose. The house of language is spinning through space. I’m immersed in language and pushing these words toward you. Why? Because I visited Great Falls, Montana, once. I mean, what exactly goes on the life of an oyster anyway?

These are my experiments in dirt. No, the locomotive isn’t an oval, but it is symbolic. I put it here for the details, which are combustible, and brassy as a T-shirt. The river is full of counsel. We should listen to the water. It seems to know what it’s doing. Water is like that. So transparent, so full of currents and fish. Even the ocean is a dead giveaway. The groupers are choirs and the angelfish hum. Life is a journey. Or so they say. The ghost of a pig, for example. Or boats. There is a sky at the bottom of the ocean. It is made of churchyards and clouds. One day it will rise to the surface and I will feed it my wounds. How do you weigh the world? I blow on my fingers and wait for the sun to rise in my thumb. 

I’m concerned with the camels. Arthur Rimbaud keeps piling goods on their backs. It’s a long way across the Danakil Desert. The horizon resembles a rugged knife. The salt has the weight of an archaic stamp.

But that was another lifetime ago, before the Beatles or Allen Ginsberg. Today the goats are helping the carpenter of the sky build a beautiful waterfall. This will achieve the humidity of a cardiovascular tomahawk as fleshy folds of indignity boil in the vigilante’s violin.

The air gets cool and dimples the intervals like vespers in a Yorkshire gym. I see no chicken whose shape in chocolate would circumscribe my guests. Ergo, I forego the lanolin, and prepare for transit.

Independent portholes chronicle the passage of Greenland.

I love my desk. Did I mention cranberry? Colors burst out of me. Some of them are charming and some of them are bitter as wormwood, or the chancellors of Germany. These colors drift quietly to the floor and become fairy tales in which the marsh tells tales of thorny sprawl. Colors are just the humors of an icy whippoorwill. There will be more when the kneecaps arrive with their lambent taxis and vegetable hats. Nothing is insentient, not even TV evangelists. Everything grins on the subatomic level. The recitals are sluttish but the diseases are memorable.

The world itself is a fabrication, so why not the crunch of gravel beneath your feet? There are circumstances in which a panacea of light strikes the lake with its ribbons of gold and I can hear the smell of the ceiling and it’s a balm to the axle of my nerves. This is called reflection, and is welcome to the portfolio of life.

Are you aware right now of what’s happening? The mailbox antenna speeds into the sponge of the future spinning strands of the past.

This search isn’t over. There is a bubbly autonomy to these words as they percolate through consciousness.

Where did the goats go?

They’re still here. They’re standing on my head, grazing tufts of Ethiopian coffee.

What would I do without poetry? I’d still have the creak of the door and the laundry to fold.