This Thing I'm Doing

Time to write simply now, simple like Beckett, Beckett in his elder years. I want Beckett’s craggy old face, the eighty-something Beckett, a face of crags and crabs and wrinkles and runnels and ruts. The eyes of a hawk. The bristle of a thistle. The riddle of a scribble. Rumple of a shuffle. Simple dimples. Pickled ripples. Giggly tinkles. Piano keys in olive sonatas, refractive galactic galvanic octaves, emotions in notes, phrases in stages. Words in herds. Herd heard by the ears in an acoustic chew stick. The ear of the seer is here to hear. The stick is to chew. The chew is to strew the stew to the throat. And what’s a way to say swallow.

Time is a slime in the grime of a dime. A penny is plenty if you have more than twenty and a nickel to trickle into a meter when the cost of a space is softly and calmly valid. A salad of curb and chrome and asphalt and verb. A verb is either a noun phrase or a blaze of Motown. A verb is a word that expresses being and what does it do it does nothing if there’s nothing to do. Otherwise a verb must work its way forward through a sentence undulating in the nudity of a moment.

Change is either something that alters or is a gob of metal in the hand.

The modern quarter is 75% copper and 25% nickel. The profile of George Washington is on the obverse. An eagle is on the reverse. E Pluribus Unum is inscribed above its head. Why an eagle? Why not a pigeon? A sparrow? A turkey? A robin? A crow? A heron? A pterodactyl? A spondee? A trochee? An anapest?

I believe the image that best serves the object at hand is a dirigible. A fissionable pyramidal cetacean of the air. You might picture it as a hat, or a half sister named Render.

This can be a kitchen if you want.

Or a ramble through the ways and trays of life as it throbs in utter effusion.

When the whisper is whispered the engine is in session.

Let’s call it an explanation, a duration, a flotation, an elation of quartz. A piece of existence hard as a rock and soft as a sock. A piercing, a dispersing. An inquiry. A diary.

Let’s call this, this thing I’m doing, this activity, let’s call it a search. I’m looking for something. Not water, not a book, certainly not a job, nothing so simple, nothing so satisfying, nothing so brutally obvious. Let’s avoid the obvious. The obvious hides what it reveals. The  obvious is obviously oblivious to its own obviation. The secret secretes a sequel.

It is the transcendent that we want. That push toward the upper realm, as if we could lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and walk right into the sky and sit down on a cloud. Say hi to the sun. Caress the moon. Harness the stars to a slow religion. I’m happy with that solution. Call it ablution. Substitution. The world in writing. The world in letters. In feathers and sweaters. Would it appear as if I were more concerned with words than what the words designate? The meaning is not outside these words, but in these words, humming and drumming, whistling and bristling, bubbly like a pie, a dough containing cherries, a circumference of air, a radius of crust, an approximation of pi, intermediaries, libraries and wood.