Slow Henry

I like the light bulbs in the bathroom. The little bulbs at the top rim of the mirror. Where it begins in the morning. My face. That person standing in the brightness wandering how it all began, where did it all go, why is there something rather than nothing? How much longer before the artic ice disappears? Before we all disappear?

A lot of us hope that doesn’t happen. But you can’t stand on hope.

Hope is nonsense. I don’t like hope. It sets you up for disappointment. It swarms with delusion.

I offer, as an alternative, dispensation. I can’t give it to you. I don’t have that kind of authority. Not even in a place like this, which isn’t a place so much as a process. But I leave it here at your doorstep as a suggestion. A proposal. An invitation.

There are times, I think, when thinking makes things emerge, all that energy in the brain, whatever one chooses to call it, does sometimes produce a helpful image, a furnace, an athanor, a Slow Henry, as the alchemists called it. There are experiences and translations of those experiences. Distillations, sublimations, compounds. One can make of the world a loom of golden parables. A bonfire. A surf. A thunderous pounding of water on a sandy beach in Tabatinga.  

Lumber, at the very least. Planks of pine and oak in a drafty building.

I think I’m a carpenter who builds things with ink, and the next thing you know, I’ve created a birdhouse of words, a wordhouse.

Ok, maybe that’s not just a good example. It’s a nice wordhouse, as wordhouses go. Why abuse it with rumination? The glow of a hinge in the hodge-podge of the ponderous shines forth to inform the senses of phenomena begging description and definition.

Is why.

Am I negligent? I try not to be. I try to be careful. I try to notice things. I try to notice what I’m doing. Even though, much of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Sometimes I see Herculean colors fissioning in the pretext of a sunflower and amalgamate it into a heliotrope.

Drugs can be adjectives. Adjectives can be excursions. Excursions can occur on water. Water can be random. Water loves being random. Though I think it’s a mistake to arbitrarily attribute self-awareness to water. Water is water. Sloppy. Like me. Who is 60% water.

If mistakes were money I’d be a millionaire. This is why I believe singing belongs in an elevator. My singing. Which is strange and full of experience. You can’t boycott experience. Experience just happens. I was born to be a comma.

The lobster has a weird body. But it’s not the fault of the lobster. It is the responsibility of the lobster to be a lobster, to eat what a lobster needs to eat to continue being a lobster, take some time out to reproduce, make more lobsters, bring more lobsters into the world, in whatever manner lobsters have devised for themselves to reproduce. And what makes the body of the lobster weird to me? These are simply my perceptions. I’m sure that my body is weird to the lobster. If (as one might assume) the lobster has any sense of what might be an anomaly, an anatomical eccentricity, then certainly the lobster will perceive the human body as extraordinary. Skin, for example, might seem strange to a lobster, adorned as it is in a carapace equipped with claws and antennae. It’s hard to think what a lobster thinks. Meanwhile, I listen to the Rolling Stones sing “Blue Turns To Gray,” which has little to do with lobsters and everything to do with feeling troubled, feeling uneasy, feeling unsatisfied.

I’m tangled up in gray. I squeeze the morning sun. The Beast hands me a shaker of salt. The horizon splits the day from night. I feel eloquent as a speed bump.

I belong to a strange group of people called poets. Imagine being immersed in an activity with no commercial potential. Abstraction feeds on reverie. I keep feeding abstraction. Abstraction plays comparisons into prospect. The whipped cream articulates the rhythms of our conversation.

Money is always hypothetical. Surround yourself with healthy advantages.

My species has not been successful.

A book is written each time someone reads it. There is redemption in the present. The only cure for summer is more summer. I’m soaked in phenomenology. Who knew that everything in the world was so delicately interrelated? Let’s go searching for mushrooms in Iceland. Interactions heal the poverty of power.

Here are some artifacts of the 17^th century: an embroidered shoe, Constance Hopkin’s beaver hat, a lobed Delft dish with a swan.

The frenetic taste of conflict keeps words churning in my brain. I see Buffalo Bill filling an SUV with gas. The pregnant charm of a drugstore. The spectral dots of Dagwood.

As much as I ingest the world, I exhibit the world. I like swimming in swimming pools. Rivers freak me out a little. It’s hard to carry a generation in your voice. The kiss of wealth decomposes rapidly. What you want to do is get reborn. Look what happens when you stay alive this long. A broken escalator is just another set of steps. Use them carefully. Each step is important.

A man gets into a red Mazda and it coughs into action, electricity careening through the wires.

The hammer is immersed in its purpose. All the electrical cords get tangled up here in the eternally humid Northwest. My fingers respect the feeling of aluminum. Don’t panic if the immaterial materializes. Celebrate the fact of your existence. The drapery redeems the view. An embryonic telecast bubbles on my lap. Pathos is a giant sip of universe.