The Elegance Of Leaving

Why are ghosts always represented as bed-sheets? Death is nothing. Nothing without England and its historical debris. Nothing without a fugitive understanding of life’s most basic courtesies. Sleep and nuance. Umbrellas and cows.

The invention of thirst comes to us dressed as a mythical taffeta in the tenacity of an ant. Red feathers on a white table. Certitude. Incertitude. The philosophy of yourself.

An X-ray and the light behind the X-ray. Bones. Prisms. Gregorian chant.  

Nothing beats the elegance of leaving a job. A party. A bad marriage. An excruciating eulogy. A firm decision. An endless war. An ideology gone sour.

Death is nothing. The fragrance of a casket is unaffected by its mystery. It is sometimes sudden, sometimes long and inquiring. 

Death is nothing but hoes in a row in a pink garage. Brian Jones smiling at Howlin’ Wolf. Letters thrashing around in a sentence. Nothingness is underrated. So is the shine on the shell of a crab. Eyebrows are incidental, like molasses and papier collé.

The poet is a nomad with nowhere to go. The United States has become an open-air prison with an extortionate hellcare system. I’m old enough to remember streetcars. So when I say that the poet has nowhere to go, I mean nothingness articulate as a gravel driveway. I mean clumsy indications of death walking through the eye of a needle. I mean camel. I mean rich man. I mean crinkly old dollar and words in a process of waves moving up and down a cobra neck-tie.

Poetry is an engine of ice, helter-skelter at a Cincinnati gas station. Caress the spine of a dragon. I will tell you what it’s like to eat lobster on a private jet. I will tell you how to articulate the gravel of a driveway without using nails or nutmeg. I once corresponded with a cringe. Which I later pumped to the surface of my skin and showed it around town like a tattoo of shadows boiling in the midnight of a woman’s fingernail. I’m sympathetic to most vibrations, but I’m mostly favorable to the forehead when it’s lit up by a crown of electricity. It’s a good look. I agree to nothing but what goes on in my fingers. Golden oarlocks on a red boat. Think of it as symbolism, something out of the late 19^th century. A huge barroom metaphor that answers the demands of reason with a tiger’s head and a snake between its teeth. I feel the exclamation of stalagmites in my guts. Opinions slam the door on discussion. If you have an opinion nail it to the wall and shoot it with a .38 caliber toad.

Do you like cream in your gridlock? Feathers are marvels of engineering. Can I offer another version of myself that explains these things? Some people like to punch the air when they dance. But I’m not going to pretend I’m Mick Jagger. You don’t know who I am. Who am I? I am you. I am us. I am her. I am him. I am everyone. But mostly I’m a guy looking for a way out of here.

Gravity is a cure for science. But nothing cures a heartache like the bone black in a painting by Rembrandt. No amount of logic can explain a clam. But I can tell you what a sparkle looks like in the eye of a monkey. Watch it dilate. The mind dilates. Did you know? Yes. And I’m hooked on polyphony. A crinkly old dollar. Zen mosquitos on a hairy arm. Bend the milk into asphalt. The forklift lifts a pallet of formaldehyde and so concludes: death is nothing. What is the source of this emotion? Flames thundering out of the bottom of a rocket. The lure of Titan. Buffalo on the plains in 1752.