Vaseline

Nipples are simple. They express tenderness. Montgomery glands. Muscle contractions. Areola. The stride of emperors, the fireflies of queens.

The excursion drill does cartwheels. I sigh like a congenial river. An angel trickles a blaze of lotus. It gets to me. I scream at the plug until it bends into a claw. And that’s what I take with me to the party.

I knock. The door opens. I leave all admonition behind and enter with a dream of snow. I envision a chronology of pumps and maintain a rectangular smile. I’m moody, it’s true, but who can say what a hiccup is? It is timeless all the way to the top of the spur. You can feel a visceral summer wrestling itself inside a hint of sponsored gospel.

The future doesn’t look good. But we’ll see what we can do about bringing the saddles and bedrolls to Sweden. If the hedonism is a success, and the tarts careen through our digestive tracts the way they’re supposed to, we can move on from there.

The importance of the Great Chain of Being in eighteenth-century thought is hard to overestimate, but none but the Apaches walked these mountains until the cry of the red hawk could no longer be heard. This was the year of riding through abandoned stations on the riverside line. The moon sat down like a delta, and said nothing, while the puppets lolled around in vowels, clacking like together like consonants at the end of a string.

We wanted to discuss everything then because we could see how it was all interrelated, how the people coming to our shore under a cloud of pessimism and despair had something unique to offer, something paroxysmal and warm.

Nothing feels quite so good as clean sheets right out of the dryer. Or the first hot shower after having a cast on your leg removed.

Hunger sags in a painting of toppled contact. The blossoms clink together like gizzards. Henna flaunts its peculiarities. I operate a little sleep until it hurries away into a cloud of spoons. I think movement is a thrilling steam to press into insight. It will become a reverie, the fabric of a thought for our journey, and permeate the carillon of our translucence, permitting ointment, and herring.

I can mime the butter better if I slouch a little at the picnic table. Nevada is larger than you imagine. The hills go away like swans until the moon plummets from its socket and plops in your glass like a cube of shadows. The cry of a loon echoes Baudelaire.

There is solace in a tray of rope. The road flare reminded me a little of a secretion I once saw come out of a man’s arm and smile like a cringe of embarrassed amber.

More recently, I’ve developed a taste for Barbizon cows.

The road flare widens the night. We collect compliments from the landscape which we put in baskets and then put aside as opinions, or goose bumps. They will come in handy later, when the sun rises, bringing with it a new day, a new mathematics, a new herd of cows.

The reality of lubrication makes me cringe. I wince like a novel of iron, a story of hyperboreal longings and improbable migrations. Reindeer clutter the sticks of the sentence until it goes unconscious and ends in a feeling of fumaroles and driveways, a long slow simmer of Icelandic angst. I feel a vibration in the air and stand back and let it all in: the peculiar noises a garage door makes when it opens and you see Lou Reed sitting in a lawn chair sipping coffee.

Experience is a force for good. Whatever you do in life, experience penmanship. Find a trombone or a stepladder and put some vowels in it. Open a can of paint. Polish a football trophy. Study a bas-relief in the light of our diagnosis, our being thrust into a world hectic with orthography and design, a Dasein, a bubbling string of excellent salt.

Sometimes we sit in the parlor polishing our buttons. The lines of a palomino can be seen to faintly emerge from a sheet of absorbent paper. I drop my gaze onto it to gently coax it into equilibrium, a balance of volume and plume. My nerves fondle the idiosyncrasies of Reykjavik. Seclusion is hot and nutmeg. I find a gardenia by pulling the lob of a warm haunted ear. Steam feels like a natural beginning, a way to enjoy breakfast while floating various ideas in the friendly light of a speedometer, the velocity of another vacillation bedding down in a jar of Vaseline.