Ghosts

Why are ghosts always represented as bedsheets? Is it because dishrags have faces? Never underestimate the fertility of a pain. I once saw an oyster get in a car & drive. It was mad with energy & looked like Neal Cassady. It’s clear to me this world has reached its apotheosis. Everything drips with reverie. The breath of crickets creates a world. Although that sounds a little stupid, & unnecessary. We all have things to share. Ecstasy isn’t just a drug. There is also the timeless string of the yo-yo. Look around you: nobody plays the concertina at Costco. The antlers are immaterial. Keep it simple, I say. I no longer have ambitions. I have bedsheets. 

I will be the meaning I want, oil & turpentine & rocks. This has been my ambition all along. All I ever wanted was to cohere in a ball of molecules & then write about the experience. Everything I am made of comes from the world. Particularly if there is suddenly a planet of green meadows & grazing cattle & swimming pools sprawled out within this sentence. Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being, says Pessoa. Yet he has nothing to say about swimming pools, or the sprawl of a sentence & the way the words get lost in it, going in & out of squalor like a traffic light. If stirred up sediment is left alone the sediment will settle to the bottom & a clear pool of water will appear. It is the same with feelings, but different. When feelings settle at the bottom of the paragraph the rest of the words fall asleep. Dreams arise. And this is a cause of igloos. 

Am I sometimes the ancient darkness of furniture? It stirs me with proverbs. This morning, as I ate a banana, I thought about the quiet life of the refrigerator, a mountainous terrain of thick Douglas fir & mists & dense underbrush. I affirm it with science & grapefruit. Why shouldn’t Galileo go around being telescopic if Jupiter is a gas giant? Feelings are weird. Why do they persist? How is the value of a feeling determined? I use a series of bathythermographs to measure the feelings that I want to wave around in the air like words & shit. This one is blue & this one is a fizzy almanac of myriad somnolences. Death is a private affair. Grace is where words collide creating sparks. Socks are soft. And the universe floats in a single human voice. 

Pulling things out of the air isn’t natural. It leads to enchantment. And there it is: a row of poplars bowing to the wind. Most mornings I wake up with a sense of dread. If it’s raining I stab gravity with an umbrella. I find it later, dangling in the air like a mammogram. I don’t know what to do with it. Can you hold this sentence a minute while I go write it? This is what is known in phenomenology as a temporal awareness within the stream of consciousness, a.k.a. bullshit. If the light is red, we stop. But if the light is amber, & it’s midnight, we take ourselves apart in the car until there’s nothing left but words. Which proves nothing. So we just keep doing it.