Paper Revolt

I want to jingle when I walk. Experience shattering visions of alpine bears. I want to talk about the endless road of existence in a forlorn attic. New adjectives will have to be coined. I want to sit cross-legged in Rimbaud’s grinning bones. I’m strongly attracted to everything and feel it exploding in my head. Nothing needs decipherment. Daylight ate my shadow. I’m capable of great distention. I understand a chair by sitting in it. I feel the great chain of being in my right thumb, and drop to the sandy bottom of Lake Eerie leaving behind a residue of words, syntax crashing around the soft breast of infinity.

I feel the lift of a powerful emotion, I don’t know what it is, but the walls are burning down. Start your engines. Metamorphism swarms with energy. I see soap in a brown soap dish and think of digging a deep hole for a convocation of listeners. Sawdust trees. The walk will do us good. Genres can be mingled.

There’s a dusty frontier town in my show. I’ve rigged it for salvation. I’ve polished the binoculars. Constancy falls into a trance. The candles are burning aloud. I hear the flames screaming like spots on the sun. I see an angel dribbling from a Christmas tree, the shadow of a vagabond merge with traffic, people scattering on the other side of the river, though a few are wading into shallow and rough water. Shout your lungs out. Tell them to stop. The implications are curiously dexterous, like the shapes in a Chicago nightclub, or a paper revolt.

I wear adversity like a garment. Gravity with a henna collar. I gaze at the wall. If we can extend the life of the grass, we will feel the ascension of angels in our hiccups. Do you believe in ghosts? Ghosts are a good idea. Please appoint me head of some confusion, any confusion, doesn’t matter which, doesn’t matter where, I’m just confused.

It’s always tempting to accommodate one’s illusions. They’re all we have. Sometimes it’s cruel not to say yes.

Let’s explode the matrix to smithereens. My chaos is contagious. Let’s pump some feeling to the surface and see what it does.

Seattle is a damp place. Everywhere I see concrete walls covered in moss and lichen, like walls of opium in a dream where I feel myself converging with the sparkle of ultramarine, and everything is taken in with gratitude and humbleness. We see birds on the ground, heads cocked to hear worms. Nothingness is underrated.

I’ve carved my reticence out of a bullet. But it’s not working. It looks more like brocade for a thyroid gland than an infringement on my self-esteem, or a proverb with a reed mouthpiece.

I’ve detonated my regalia. What good is it now? Your presence here is much appreciated. Please know that.

Here I am galloping through another sentence. I like to bang around in a bong, a tube of air containing a totem of vowels, all the vibrations you’ll ever need to see the fog in my blister. It comes to us by revelation, a narrative tornado tearing our conceptual greenhouse apart, yet strangely leaving all the orchids intact. I guzzle some whiskey and write a letter to the city council. We’re all pulling a great weight, but here’s a water pie to make your day go better. It gleams like a chisel on the wall. A hit song thrashing around in a jukebox. It holds my sweat in a stone. Exploration is a must. You can’t go through life without exploring anything. That’s why we’re here. We’re the universe exploring itself.

A door opens to another dimension. I’m wearing a finger of ice, a necklace of tin soldiers. If we have enough salt we can assemble a star in a garden of nerves. We have seclusion in a farmhouse. And except for the onions, it’s easy enough to endure one’s personality. Throw yourself into it. Don’t be shy. Walk out of yourself, tame as a TED talk, and tell everyone about yourself. Tell them what time is. Tell them that time is nothing more than a little upholstery, something to soften the steam of intuition at noon when the guano changes color and the innocent come forward to be initiated in espresso. That it talks to us in a forward-driven story and ends with a monolith humming “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

That it eats the sky at midnight and coughs it back up at dawn, tyrants and derelicts alike rising to touch the gown of morning, brush their teeth and do what they do, go where they go.