Together In Alyssum

Sometimes I think of a trout garnished with slices of lemon and boiled potatoes and sometimes I think of trees communicating with one another via subterranean mycorrhizal networks: the fine, hairlike root rips of trees that join together with microscopic fungal filaments to form the basic links of the network.

Look at my forehead. You might see goldfish swimming back and forth. Fireballs, cue sticks, waves. I believe in imagery. I believe in the underworld and twinkles of subterranean pus. I believe in transformation and blood. I believe gravity is a brochure of translucent pratfalls. It walks around in my head looking for cognac. All it finds are towels and a few antiques. I moisten my hands with cornhusker lotion and hammer another nail into the aroma of Texas.

Not even the cold can stop the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Not that it matters. I’m off the grid. We all sing gospel now. It’s been a natural progression. Think of a creek. Think of a fool. Think of a creek and a fool and a pound of reverie. The story is ordinary but the bubbles are stunning.

And why wouldn’t they be? This is what the conditional was made for. To be able to intone someone’s name until they appear to be sensible and combed, like the quiet trudge of hunters in the snow. I would like to sit in chintz and say something startling, something that twinkles with carbuncles amid the debris of existence.

Some of us laugh, some of us cry, some of us work on a map. This will be a special map. The map will be similar to the Roman empire, but not so similar it will it linger in socialization, making the metal spherical and the muskrats lonely.

The map is not the cake. The map is baked in the cake. The cake is upside down. There’s no reason for this and so we call it a fugue. A fugue results from the mathematics of sound. The mathematics of sound is baked in the legs when dancing occurs. Dancing is baked in blood. Blood becomes warmer with age. Age is baked in maturity. Maturity is baked in cognition. Cognition is knowledge. Knowledge is what you know. Impenetrability is what you do not know. The drone of cognition clarifies the stutter of rain. Traditions are chiefly glass. If a tradition is upside down washing machines and talk-shows fall out of it. This creates gurus and duplication.

The awareness that human existence is both joy and woe is prerequisite to accepting medication for the effronteries to one’s insignia. My inseminations will sometimes be exaggerated, but I ought to do my best to adhere to metaphors rather than to heave the bulk of my language on you before it has been refined with a little tennis and statuary.

The rest is guano. A little cut on the finger and it all coagulates into structure. Dollars of grotesque lucidity and florists languishing in pandemonium. The snapdragons are in rebellion. But the roses are big as suitcases and the black-eyed Susan and Heart of Jesus come together in sweet alyssum.