Gomek

Grammar is a phenomenon that the heart affirms with its rhythms. It comes ashore as foam and whispers cypress and palm. It retreats. It advances. There is systole and diastole. There is dreaming and wakefulness. I become a notebook filled with descriptions of the local park. My birth happens every minute. I feel the membrane of the universe connecting me to the stars that stir in my sleep. I see the flesh of giants in the melting of candle wax. I join a caravan and explore the world of silk and paleontology. Every theory needs repeating and arguing because there are so many different realities. It can be exhausting. But we all pack a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and Oreo cookies and go to work merrily as the winds buffet our clothes and the cliffs defy our embrace.

Give me some sauerkraut and a tap and I'll be happy. Marinate some crocodile meat in a mood of inconsolable weariness and I’ll be happier. Why? I don’t know. I like the word 'crocodile.' It rhymes with turnstile. Which rhymes with argyle. Which rhymes with reconcile. Which rhymes with tactile. I like anything tactile. A tactile turnstile reconciles argyle to versatile. And I like that. It’s symphonic and silhouetted and cud.

Gomek, a saltwater crocodile captured in Papua New Guinea in the 1950’s, grew to be 17.8 feet long and weighed 1,896 pounds. He was quite tame and people could approach him within one meter at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Anastasia, Florida. He died of a heart disease on March 6^th, 1997, and was believed to have been 80 years old.

I like crocodiles. Though, to be frank, I’ve never been close to one. We have a lot of developers in our neighborhood, but that’s a different kind of reptile. Much more destructive. They’ve become bloated with greed and corruption and vomit up luxurious apartment suites for the androids who work at Amazon.

The vigorous periphery of your embalming goes to the heart of things. But I have my lassitude to protect me from the tremors of ambition. The stems by the water provide theories of life that the vagueness of the fog welcomes with the chimerical hardware of commas and cashmere. These are simple things, but they’re the script I was given when I showed up for the audition. I was told to play a king, and so the words I uttered helped me to walk in the gold of redemption. I forgave when I could forgive and was forgiven when I forgave. Yet nothing felt as good as slapping the air with my sleep.

And I awoke feeling quadrilateral. A little disheveled, but fit for service. It’s true, there was a little meringue on my chin, but I could still play my role in the sensible world, and say sensible things, and do sensible things, while feeling nonsensical as birds.

So yes. There is a teleology, however undernourished it is at the moment. We can make improvements. I can walk on all fours and eat things. Shoes, furniture, people. Don’t come too close. Prose poems can be dangerous. They have large membranous wings and manifold ideals of steel. I can suit your temperament or pour you some wine. Your call. I just want to surface occasionally and eyeball the surroundings until some words appear and the entire mechanism rumbles about like egg whites on a journey of glossy superfluity. I can’t promise taffeta, but it’s a direction.