Synoptic Nostrils

Sometimes I see a prose poem and ask myself why anyone would write such a thing. There are so many words. We must not rush things. We must take our time and linger among the assumptions. Ruptures will occur, and moons. Mongolian yurts drift through a sleepy sister hanging below my waist. Bedsprings creak me to Paris. My arms meet their own correspondence when I roar.

The sun bubbles in its bullion and overflows. Intentions are cut into oarlocks. I rummage the heat for a thump of metal. I want rivets for my bridges and Norway for my shoes. Harmonica bombs converse with the mustard. Handles are powerfully tried by men who wear somnolent expressions of trudge.

The stew crackles on hiatus. The jug swerves to miss a stepladder. I carry a thought of titbits to a sheet of paper and put them down in bombast. The effect is fossils. The past is in the future and the future is in the past. The clouds are packed in a box and the accordion wheezes jelly. 

For almost twenty years, I have been a journalist in the digital environment, a land of mirages and runaways, of enormous excesses. It was a mirror to larks and, for me as for many others, the place of a mad hope. That I attribute a colossal power of transformation to a trifle, that I am blinded by the very symptom I both laud and despise, I fully admit. But this hybrid technology is coupled with a reverse phenomenon. What brings the meaning of technology now to its fullest expression is its erasure. It tends to hide itself. One could say that that is its ambition, the meaning of its story: to blend in with the landscape. And by disappearing, it invades everything.

Thus, in theory, there is a species of absurdity to want to know things otherwise than by intelligence; but, if we accept the risk frankly, the action will slice right through the knot that reasoning has tied so firmly it will not come undone. The metaphysics or deep thinking that philosophy reserves to do in a quiet nook at the library, will receive their evidence ready-made as positive science, already contained in the descriptions and analyses from which they gave the philosopher buckets of slippery worry.  For not having wanted to intervene, from the beginning, in the questions of fact, philosophy is reduced, in questions of principle, to formulate purely and simply in more precise terms the metaphysics and arcanum unconsciously, hence inconsistently, that draws the very attitude of science vis-à-vis reality. The form is no longer quite isolable from matter, and he who began by reserving philosophical questions of principle, and who wanted, by this, to put philosophy above science as a Court of Last Resort, will be led, step by step, not to make it a mere kangaroo court, charged at most to spell out in more precise terms the sentences that arrive irrevocably rendered.

Everything in life is ephemeral, permeable, and cork. Duration protects the shell of dissonance, which in turn serves the distribution of deviled eggs.

I’m not even sure what a horsefly is. I think they’re bigger than your average flies, the ones you find in poorly tended kitchens, or banging against the window glass in a stuffy living room. This is why the symbolic flirts with innuendo, glimmering with manuscripts in a paregoric motel. All one has to do is think of Wyoming and then compare it to a submarine. Clearly, the road ahead is more than a little prepossessing, it might also be a little long in locoweed.

Roll the window down and smell it: sage. Hank Williams is on the radio. Whatever one may think of thunder, it’s uncanny how it rolls across the distances seconds after the lightning has flashed, providing what appears to be a second opinion, a mumbling over the realities we’ve just witnessed.