Möbius Dick

Here’s some thermometer thunder. You can muzzle the muzzy but you can’t gratify everyone so why even try. Here’s a calliope cocoon and here’s a dusty daub of speed. I can feel it in this body I’m walking around in. I’m religious about mountain climbing. I’m also afraid of heights and have never climbed a mountain. But I’m still religious. Let’s say I’m religious about mountains and leave it at that. Glue me to a prospect overlooking a beautiful temperature.

Death is a private affair. An unconditional lucidity. Frog plop in a woodland pond.

We all love a good fantasy. Here comes one now subversive and gray. Your age is not your actual age. Whatever diplomacy you bring to the pinnacle in Nietzsche’s toolbox our life together is walnut. Push the drum kit closer. We all want to hear that rhythm, that splash of cymbals in the ovum of time. We endure the world best by opening to it. The painter’s chin has paint on it.

Cerulean blue.

I fall into employment when the car door opens. I drive. I gnaw at a garden vegetable. I play with the air. It impels reflection. I play with money. It impels oligarchy and musk-ox.

Ages makes us sag. But I can mime the virtue of patience by standing in line minding my own business. I have a load of napkin rings, potato chips and pretzels. I have a door carved by a Viking sculptor and the sound of a saw screaming through a plank of wood is the bone black dissonance of a cognition modeled on the asymmetry of the hippocampus and amygdala. I’m flourishing here as a painter. I feel the sympathy of earth in a loaf of bread, how the universe is flourishing and swollen and each star is the boil of plasma, electrons, protons and alpha particles with bad breath and nothing to else to do but wait and see what God is going to do next.

Meanwhile the universe shines monotonous as a circumference that is everywhere and whose center is nowhere. Although I do believe matter and energy are one and the same cartwheel. You know? Something like the smell of snow, or an X-ray revealing the bones of a prophet. Words have that power. This very minute your eyes are holding my language as I get off this stool and drag a bundle of magazines closer.

I’m writing a play about a man and a woman on a raft negotiating the rapids of an eyeball. It has neither ending nor beginning. I call it Möbius Dick.

Lord let the obloquies give me power till the realism gets here. I feel you under my skin. I can hear the estuary stroll into a melody and moo like a sparrow at high tide. Wood speaks to wood. I flex both my arms in a greenhouse and power this introspection with the steel gonorrhea of a rubbed astronomer. An infinite jest enriches our confusion. A little nasty fondling here and there is good for the soul. My brain feels gray as the fur of an old cat walking over a banana and a pineapple on an operating table. The ethicist mumbles something half asleep in an armchair, a statement bewildering as a tumor, leg with an odd bump. Dusty old book cluttered with hymns. A jar of pickles.

Rattlesnakes aren’t cruel they’re just rattlesnakes. Morality doesn’t exist in nature. Grace and energy belong to the realm of the highway. This is where words and people collide creating sparks. And where, sooner or later, people might gradually perceive the universe in a single human voice.