Stiches

The sun breaks the sky into rags. Let’s walk along the border. My stick has a memory. The engine strains to get us over the hill. Don’t worry. There are signs. Yesterday I saw a nose walking down the street. There was a head attached. It had ears and a mouth and a pair of eyes. Hair. Legs. Arms. Everything. Do you know what it is that I’m saying?

It was a woman with a turquoise bear on the middle finger of her left hand.

We are prisoners of our own ideas. Everyone needs a sense of the sublime. Otherwise life gets awkward and ugly. It’s like holding a brandy snifter with a pair of boxing gloves on your feet.

For years, I caught the bus to the U-district in front of Jimmy Woo’s Jade Pagoda. And then I didn’t. I moved to a different hill. A different state of mind. A different picnic.

You can create a universe with your breath. Here is the filigree of my breath. Twist and shout. Plaster is plausible. Watch for falling rocks. Contrariety adorns the aching world. Do you sometimes feel like you’re falling through yourself into a lost world?

It’s more aromatic by the side of the road. Each species is an articulation of a new idea, a new adaptation. Conditions are always changing.

Don’t talk to me about guilty pleasures. I know all about guilty pleasures. I really like watching Mel Gibson movies.

I’m adapting to the sheer nonsense of the United States of Nonsense.

Our bed is a condensation of paradise. The story of my life is just heating up. If I were part of a salvaging team I’d be in the deep looking for Prospero’s book. Ocean swells moving in a symphony of engorgement and movement above me.

How much more insecure can you be than to lose an entire planet? The cactus is a response to aridity. I’m a response to cactus. Pain gets sloppy sometimes.

Planet Earth is losing its birds and bees to pesticide and constant wildfires. What can be done to save it? I’m not a king. I’m not a politician. I’m a wrestler. I’m a fool. I like sharp things. I like soft things. All I want to do is propagate the art of sewing, which is a rhapsody.

From Greek rhapsōidia, from rhaptein ‘to stitch’ + ōidē ‘, song, or ode.

The pelvis swivels according to the needs of the body. The conditions of life. I wish I could heal the look in your eyes. Think of me as a ball of molecules in an eccentric orbit. My glasses justify themselves by distinguishing reality from mirrors.

I don’t belong here.

When was the last time you stopped at a motel without calling ahead and making a reservation?

Almost anything in language or done by words is an invention. I smell the filet of a dead chimera. All my jobs have been shit jobs. The power of Picasso is most evident in the nude. So please: don’t touch my desk. My head is an arena of scars. Afterthought can be helpful but don’t get lost in rumination. Rumination will ruin you. Ruin you with rumination. Eyeballs circling your head.

You can break anything you want but please don’t break my heart.

A dragon acquires reality by spreading its wings. Jack Nicholson in a Cadillac. I set my rocket down on the surface of Titan. A mysterious form of life lifts itself from the ground and peers in through the porthole. Meanwhile, on earth the rice fields open to the rain. And the savage trumpets of estrangement play a funeral march in the brain of a cobra.

Abstraction heals the telephone. That happened in New Jersey, where I once played André Breton in a play about fertilizer.

I feel the timeless fire of language. I have dilated pupils and a textbook fog. My legs are allegories for the adventures of my arms. There’s always a Friday buried somewhere in Monday. Every stitch of the fabric of time is a part of me. Silos. Insects. A flash of lightning to the south. What can one say about actuality that makes sense as a framework for you experience, as a sign that points beyond itself? We see a car. The shine of chrome, the rumble of an engine. And what then? We get in. We start it. We step on the accelerator. We accelerate. And we smile. Because it’s not our car. And it’s fifty miles to Tucson.

Time isn’t always a chronology. Sometimes it’s a tray of empty glasses. Old rusty nails in a slat of wood. An eye. A warm hand.

Zimbabwe, June 10^th, 1887. 10:21 a.m. A rhinoceros breathes on the orbit of a bee. The bee goes about its business. The rhinoceros turns, and walks away.

Seattle, Washington, September 17^th, 2017. The cat paws at the bedroom door, wanting in. Hurricane Maria is following Irma’s path and getting stronger. Hamas agreed to dissolve its governing body in Gaza. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft vaporized as it dove into Saturn’s upper atmosphere this morning. It burned up in a patch of Saturn sky at 9.4 degrees north latitude and 53 degrees west longitude.

It is Samuel Johnson’s birthday tomorrow. Take a dictionary out to dinner.

There are words that I haven’t yet left here in the sentence, raked here like leaves. Here they are. The shimmering rapport of mercury prophesies churchyards of circumspect hairdos.

Words like these are residual. They don’t belong to me. They don’t belong to you. They’ve been painted to look like portable generators. But they don’t. They look like escarole.

I’m not the captain of anybody’s fate. I don’t even know what fate is.

The fence embraces the backyard light, a bonfire in Polynesia. I catch the wind and take off.

Belief is a luxury for the inexperienced. Ambition is nothing without socks when the foghorns blow. Fasten your seatbelt. There’s a blaze on the ridge of the mountain. It’s time we got the hell out of Dodge.

I’ll tell you what fate is: Mel Gibson at the wheel of a Mack truck.