Cuckoo

Alienation is not the sole characteristic of art. There’s also the scratch of coincidence. The assembly of things. Please lend me your eyes. I will take them on a journey to the end of this sentence. My distress is a big red caboose attached to a train of languid hysteria. The seats provide a biography for my fingers, which are batons of happy geometry. Nevertheless, my Great Refusal, taken as a whole, is set afloat on a sea of words. I grow oceanic. So I’ll just go ahead and say it: thermometer thunder. Frog plop. The smell of snow. Everything becomes silent before a storm. And that’s where we’re at now. Hanging on till the next minute. As always.

We echo one another, we’re not isolated monads. My subjectivity doesn’t end at my skin, it begins at my skin. The same heart beating in me beats in you. I sing myself & celebrate myself for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. But is there a tangible relation between language & external reality? Yes and no. Either way, nobody’s going to give a shit. Most people avoid reality. It’s the sensible thing to do. Reality hurts. Illusion is its sad consolation prize. Language is available to surround our nuclear selves with narratives & context. I entered life as I found it, visceral & wet & surrounded by Minneapolis. Later, I discovered nocturnal emissions. Everything else is sighs. Be gentle. But go. Crawl to the door and bang on it hard.

I found the sound I was looking for. It was hiding in a can of turpentine disguised as a strong odor. Hibachi sizzle. Exultation wrapped in Guyana. Windows cooking coffee. A man laughing at a map. I succeed at pink & the mimes light the night on fire. I endure by making emotion float in syntax. I’m shoving some hair across my head without confusing any sounds up there. I explode into worms. If I increase my perspectives I will anchor near Marseille & be awakened by feather. The pulleys creak as we draw the sky closer. I feel the energy of sand. The brush of Cezanne.

Olivier Messaien is sitting at a colossal organ playing Quatuor pour la fin du temps. There’s a large animal growling beneath the music. The problem that’s been nagging me is the usual one: meaning. How to create meaning, destroy meaning, stroke meaning, make meaning shameless as a dream. I awake & open my eyes & consciousness floods into my head. Thinking is a strange activity. I’m the ghost that haunts myself. Sometimes I say things that are the opposite of what I feel. And sometimes I don’t understand the universe at all. You can see it without seeing it & feel it without feeling it. But in the end, you’ll find everything in the basement.

This is me drifting through time. I’m the entire cuckoo. Waves lapping the shore. So, first you’re here, & then you’re there, which is a displacement through the Seattle Art Museum. You can’t grow & harvest crops in a climate casino. You need art to make things go bananas. And then it happens: hammers. So that’s it, that’s pretty much my story. Dirt. And so I became a dumbfuck.  It’s why I developed a big vocabulary: words can disguise ugly realities.  And later in life, when I got all those shit jobs, I learned that beauty has convulsions & that the first among them is a Fender Stratocaster. I feel the lift of a powerful emotion, I don’t know what it is, but the walls are burning down. Metamorphism swarms with energy. I see soap in a brown soap dish & think a walk will do us good. Genres can be mingled. I’m a voice beside the ground. And talk to auks.