This Is What We Do

Poets need not enchant the world because the world doesn’t need re-enchantment, but must fight against those who are drying it up with platitudes & rationality. I blow on my fingers & wait for the sun to rise in the east. I believe that feeling can be expanded by toppling the pillars of the Philistine’s temple & that when the rhythms of Bo Diddley meet the investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein John Keats gets up to dance. Life is mostly just a satori of awkward recognitions. We go from belligerency to apology & hold the door open for parables. Honesty is more entertaining than mirrors, but it’s hard to live with. This is what we do when we talk about the world. We assemble a new reality with rags & chemistry & spill poetry on people.

I’ve got a notebook teeming with irritations. Here comes one now: a body of water clanking toward us in chains of imaginary fish. I see your eyes sifting through all the reasons for ignoring these words & doing something else. I can’t blame you. Eight pounds of language slid out of my mouth as soon as I entered this paragraph & I had no idea what to do with any of it. Should I take it to Goodwill? Paint it red? Feed it pessimism & hamburger? Unsatisfactory. So I sat down & wept tears of antique Andalusian porcelain. I don’t suffer indignities well. Adjusting to life in the 21^st century can require a little fortitude & patience. But when I saw my clothes running down the street I decided to inflate myself with 900 pounds of nitrous oxide & float back into the sky.

It seems to me that my mind is separate from the world, but I know that’s wrong. Otherwise, why would I be surrounded by porous external boundaries & otherworldly beings? Reality is mostly peanut butter. Interrelationships and balloons. Peter Green with a piece of cheese in his hair. Terence McKenna is the guy you want to go to for information on psychedelic experience. Also, the essays in Michael McClure’s Meat Science Essays. Planet Earth is a long walk in a blue palace. My stethoscope is pressed against the night. It’s adorably hypnotic. For example, this can be a kitchen if you want. And what is thought? I think it’s a package of new underwear.

Everything manipulates a color today. The urge to make a shape is rivers. I warp into nouns. Jingle them on a highway. The limousine is a naked mind. I extrude a bewildered destination. I’ve painted twelve elves on a bone & appreciate what it is to ooze a valentine in a little butter. I feel iron. The grapes bring us perceptions of another world. If I’m plump when I’m old does it matter? I wash my face with the tears of the moon. I can hear the gallop of horses & arrange my speech according to the emotions I feel below the technology of your breasts. The hammer is defined by its use. But the nails are awakened by chickenpox, & the house is still alive.