Welcome To My Stupor

The poem crawls across a sheet of paper in search of itself. I use a little introversion to help push it into the world. I serve the severity of my eyes. I try to understand the nature of the picnic in its fullest expression as a form of eating and as a form of sitting on a bench among the harmonies of the physical world. In spite of the naked obscurity of granite, I find the form I need in the formlessness of oblivion. Writing is the ghost of a dead sensation. Writing is a revival of sensation. Writing is a resurrection of ice, from which is derived a great shadow, a discovery of light by star and thunder.

We caress the ghost of ourselves. The ghost of what we could’ve been. The ghost of what we were. The ghost of our teeming past. The ghost of our brooding. The ghost of our prehistory. I was once a blob of protoplasm. I belonged to a beach. I had no identity. Identity came later. It was invented by a pain. A nameless sorrow.

What a stupid thing to say. What can I say. I’m feeling stupid today. This is my stupor. This is my stupefaction. My stratospheric strawberry dereliction.

Call it a fugue. Call it a hammer eating a bowl of goldfish. Call it elemental. Call it damaged by obscurity. Call it flexed by a wave of sleep.

Here comes another wave of hosiery. It must be Friday. I have a pair of wings on each shoulder and a jungle sitting beside me. I think it wants me to feed it something sublime. Isn’t that the way all poetry should begin? With a puddle of words and a cup of tea.

The wrinkle on my lap sparkles like an ambush. Only yesterday I was pasting some hills to a landscape when I heard a train whistle and looked up and saw an angel made of moss challenge a load of laundry. I tried reaching for a remote and felt a sweetening of disposition diffuse throughout the bingo parlor. We chose a more palatable doctrine to follow. Someone got up to play the violin and I felt what seemed like an intention lift me into a newer sensation of valves than I’ve ever felt before. I’m used to dials, round things with numbers on them, degrees, not the full components of life before it began pulling itself through the primordial ooze of a paragraph making its usual exhortations of untethered brass.

How will I be able to explain any of this to the parole board? I see an adjective so aghast at its own fireworks that I can stuff a paper sack full of money and reach the border before sunrise.

Sometimes you can think you’re fooling the language but the language is fooling you. There’s just no way out except to keep your mouth shut. But that doesn’t work either. The exploration will go on with or without you, the poem dragging you with it, dragging you into the places no one goes but madmen and poets, a pair of wings pounding furiously at the air.