Along For The Ride

I live near the mountains yet I rarely go there. I don’t know why. Mountains are beautiful when they’re not on fire. The mountains have been on fire a lot lately. Life on planet Earth is getting weird. When the rain comes it is long and aloof and the rocks rise to greet it. But when it doesn’t everything becomes dry and dead and archaeological. Holes play openly on my chin. Let’s roll the weekend out and spend some time exploring our true hunger, which is both a homage to Matisse and furiously contrapuntal. There is a syllable soaked in its spit that tumbles in fidgets of imposition and lights the world with iron. This would be clumsy if it weren’t diphtheria.

I’ll be honest: I like rich brown gravy on my mashed potatoes at night. That’s how strong my love is.

The people of Earth have gone insane. They wrap everything in plastic. Everything. Including knives and language.

I’m wrapped in skin. My body goes walking down the street with me in it. I’m just along for the ride. I sit and rub snowflakes on the carpet while Charlie Musselwhite’s harmonica wails “Just A Feeling.”

There are no seductions without conjunctions. Heaven is a library open all day and all night. The noises of the street are expensive to heat, but sometimes they help counter the elegance of liniment, and we let them into our elevator. Drugs are more lighthearted. Think of me as a vagrant with a valuable insight.

Perceptions change. This we know. Everything discharges an aura of worry until a combination of spirit and pizza placates the rustle of tinfoil.

I want nothing but bonfires at the border. Intensity frightens people. A police car in flames, for example, or the chronology of toast.

It will not be necessary to hibernate this year. Buttermilk translates the organs of the thermostat into the dictums of a dynastic dimple. Dirt gets tired. It needs nitrogen and equilibrium. We can set up an experiment in a basement laboratory. I endeavor to create a rebirth of everything drooling and friendly. The hypotenuse of a jackrabbit brims with silver, yet there is nothing that I can do about the interior of the retina, which reverts to reverie, and trickles rolls of crime tape. I need better rituals.

The moon is rotating on its mercury pool. Look at this. I made a tradition that I can soak in triangles. The rain stumbles around selling hats. It’s miscellaneous and rude. But who am I to make these judgments? The rain just does what it does because it’s rain. And that’s lunch, essentially, gossip enlarged by smell.

I want to explore the holes surrounding a delay in glass. The great comet of 1577 just went sailing by as if nothing mattered except the private secretions that occur deep in the forest at night. I make my muscles bigger by lifting weights. I live in a place of aggression and temerity, darkness swarming with furniture. There is always that feeling I get when I’m at the airport. I carry the sanguine face of the eclipsed moon. I’m building a truth of igloo breath. We are losing our trees to disease. And sometimes we’re just plain losing. There is no gloss to loss but the floss of its moss when the sauce is boss.

Beliefs are sometimes incidental to the rumor of invisible powers. They stir in the grass. They bloom in the intellect. They become books. They become adjectives.

How many people are in this sentence? I don’t want it to sink. Not under the weight of anyone’s eyes. Not when the world needs dragons.

Writing a poem is like wandering the halls of a hospital at night. Ganglions press against the walls of the skull. Balloons and philodendrons fill one’s peripheral vision. Heart monitors bleep. IVs drip. Perceptions and meaning assume the sensual mass of sage at twilight.

What makes people rich? I mean, it’s not money. How could it be? Money is paper. It’s not even paper anymore. It’s debt.

My experiences bicker among themselves. Meaning is something you have to make. Perceptions can be twisted or stretched and multiplied. You can bang the heart with a spoon until the moon drools wheels of pretty light or create metaphors that punch their way into writing like the redwoods of California. An iron wound of Texas oil splashes its muscle into the engine of a train rolling its fire under the stars out on the prairie at night and that, too, becomes a song for the cash registers of late capitalism. Metaphors drip from the incisors of a blue dog. 

Why does time move forward? Diamonds welcome the foundry tattoo. Molecules show how mass dreams it’s a creek. Rocks, mud, bubbling water. Things like nails and wood that happen in the brain when thinking turns to dreaming and dreaming turns to building.

Time is willowy. It’s not really clocks. It’s more like sparrows. Time tries to escape space by creating Texas. It’s a pretty good solution. Art must be art in order to be art. Texas is where nothingness goes to die. And when that happens the dawn comes crawling over the horizon with another basket of grazing cattle and the cycle renews itself at the pump. A religious feeling opens like a cabin. There is the smell of soot and moose antlers over the fireplace, messengers of asymmetry. I have a pet emotion named anger. It’s a constant companion. It doesn’t get much in the way of religion, but when a little religion comes around, a frog acquires a haiku.

There are large offers of heat in the morning and aromatic oils to ward off insects. Some of us carry gravity heavily and surely whereas others avoid it completely by sitting in a chair, or lying down on a blanket and joining the driftwood in a trance of canvas and salt. The surf moves in and out leaving its brocade in the sand. And this is what time looks like when it’s wedded to space in a handful of words anyone can lift with their eyes.