The Origin Of The World

The jabber at our table is useful. It collects our empty coordinates and gives them an echo amid the stains of time. We all have coordinates. Coordinates are things that you feed geometry to make it silky and otherworldly. Apothems, trapezoids, hot dogs. Giovanni Piranesi understood this. The cleavage of the rhombohedron is an aboriginal glimpse at the idiosyncrasies of life in an eyebrow, the way it is dreamed, and the way it is compounded into corkscrews of hair.

Do fat clothes make you look thinner? I don’t think so. But nature abhors a vacuum and so I squirt bricks at a seesaw. This causes an immediate terracotta, a kind of cringe that teleports moods of amber to a nice quiet corner in the Louvre.

It should be obvious. I yearn to grow a neck as mighty as the potato. Nails aren’t apparitions. Nor are they worlds. They’re just nails, instruments for holding lumber together in a glorious cohesion. So yeah, I guess that does make them worlds of a sort. But what isn’t a world? A dollar isn’t a world. It’s only a dollar. A million dollars is a world, but a very bad world. It’s more of a milieu than a world, a place where orchids bloom in private conservatories and a hibachi rusts on the porch as a young woman weeps from a broken heart and a hairy lout and movie producer waters his grass during a drought.

I can make more than one noise. There is a pain on each page that thinks it's a boat.

I’m not against strikes. Far from it. I stand next to the potatoes with a bottle of nitroglycerin in one hand a prayer in the other. Life doesn’t have to be sloppy, just sturdy. There is a way to articulate a grievance quite effectively with a few sparkling generalities sprinkled about the room and a little fanaticism to make it stick. You can go ahead and sag if you want, just lean back and let the jukebox selections wash over you.

But enough about fencing. What about happenings and such? Whatever happened to them? People squirming through inner tubes, or going for random walks in Amsterdam. I think I what I need right now is a little momentum and a big bowl of gravity.

Pretzels. Ocarinas. Waterfalls.

The arrival of spots expresses a break in the continuity of the climatological record. The grumble of bubbles arouses the shores of Denmark. A mermaid sits on a rock combing her hair. The fishing tackle crawls out of the dormitory clapping its signatures. We find a painter and the landscape begins to make sense as a form of analgesic, heroin or rainforest.  

The knowledge of velvet is a difficult cage to open. That’s what made the Fauves so crazy. How do you ad lib a vulva? Here it is, take a look. As you can see, the origin of the world alternates between convulsion and steam. Time may be ugly, but it’s never trivial.

All those folds, all those membranes. Life evolves in so many interesting directions. Clams, camels, kangaroos, infusoria. Tiny aquatic animals and leopards prowling stealthily through the jungle. What is the color of ooze? Let’s just call it henna and go on our way.

The thermometer does this all the time: clank by in its shadows, showing us temperatures that never existed until you scribbled the calculus of stucco on the blackboard. That made some sense, but it was too late to clink glasses with royalty. The army changed its clothes and became a crowd of individual shapes. And that’s when everything else happened, and the enamel burst our expectations, causing Spanish and horseshoes.