Whisper Museum

I like to squirt the warm treasure of words. I have sticks in my mouth and hills. It’s thrilling to watch the light travel through space. I like salt too, and colors and combs and the colors of combs.

I find consistency in skin. Skin is consistent. This is one of the characteristics of the skin and I like it. I like it because it’s consistent. And because it’s generally soft, soft in a general sense, and not like fire, which hurts if you touch it, or smell, which is inconsistent.

Creativity is an act of defiance, said Twyla Tharp. I like that. I like it because it’s true. And it’s all we have. War doesn’t work. Violence doesn’t work.

Or does it? Does violence work? Many works that include violence are quite good. The Bible, for instance, or Shakespeare. Violence makes a point. It excites the blood. It attracts and repulses simultaneously.

I’m often confused in my head. Confusion seems to be my natural state. It’s like constantly being entangled in blackberry vines. You have to stop struggling and move slowly to extricate yourself.

I also like the warm treasure of radio. And circulating blood while I crawl toward something twinkling and sexy. Perception is sometimes a ceremony involving the fingers as much as the ears. Or you can jump from a plane and open a chute and feel the surrounding air that way.

Whenever I move it’s like taking a dollop of space and spreading it around with my body.

I know that pathos elevates. It’s inherently noble. And yet fencing is expansive and pointed.

If you fall among oats on the way to the pump it’s ok. Some perceptions have a velvet understanding of extraversion and will have you rubbing up against fenceposts.

I don’t know what I mean by that. I think I meant cherry pie.

But I don’t know why.

Let’s go to the whisper museum and study the whispers in their glass cases. Whispers nailed to the air like words. Whispers thrashing around in reproductive frenzies trying to make themselves heard.

When the voice is engorged with a word like ‘glockenspiel’ it becomes suspenseful in the empty world of rain when sadness happens and the trashcans overflow in the alley and stories embroidered with skulls seem improbably congenial in ways no one expected and full of rich meaning.

The resonance of harps and guitars wrestle the hills into volume and bring the world closer to our hearts where we can hug it with our voices by singing and coordinate the sticks of language in dimensions of unprecedented wealth.

The coins of talking which fascinate the ears. The hammering of nails and making a point. The redundancy of junkyards and their peculiar romance with noise.