Rip

Once, out of the remorse & lassitude that comes with drinking too much, I poured a glass of wine into the Pacific. It felt wrong, somehow, & I worried I got the ocean drunk. And tried to persuade myself that the ocean is the very embodiment of drunkenness. Which it is. That sound you hear is one million sighs of relief. Bottles of sound, embodiments of pain walking around on sticks. A tongue sputtering in the mailbox. When we sit in silence, we dilate. Hatreds, obsessions, grudges go sparkling over the waves of a new consciousness, vanishing into mist. Contemplation is different than thinking. Contemplation has the sparkle of a wave moving over an oar. A new shade of blue. I’ve become a waterfall. I’ve become a reflection on a downtown window. One must adapt to the world in the best way possible. Romance swallows everything. The world continues to burn. We put our mouth on the nipple of a wet prediction. A day will come when there is more to a chair than a chair. I’ll verify my coordinates when I reach the summit of the next mountain. I like to feel water by swimming in it & drinking it & washing things with it. I do the same thing with my tongue. I toss it into sentences where it learns to ponder the imponderable. People get irritated & walk away. That’s ok. I have your attention, at least for now. I like feeling anonymous & moody, like a rhythm, or an escalator. How about you? What lights up your gaze? The intensity of the dawn breaks my eyes. My pain flutters in the breeze like the ghost of a clarinet. We’ll just have to spend the rest of this sentence drifting. Let’s just say not all ambitions feed on bugs & puzzles. I don’t go to the opera. I am an opera. You can always tell yourself to lift your life into the stars. Because willpower is a grand fiction. And because the ocean climbed into us to be healed. And what did we do? We got drunk. We got into saunas & tickled our brains for something to think about. Our planet was once teeming with life. Microbes, snakes, frogs, butterflies, elk, elephants, bears, deer & trees. Oceans so big you could lose all sense of proportion just looking at them. Then cities came. Life became absurd. It lost all meaning. People worked jobs that murdered their spirit & suffocated their minds. And so it came to an end. The temperatures rose & the crust hardened & the water dried up & the fields that we protected with poisons killed the very insects the plants needed to pollinate them & the poisons found their way into our blood & organs & destroyed us. Many men became rich producing these poisons. But they perished, too. We all perished. And so this rock on which you now visit is uninhabitable by anything but these words, these derelict pixels adrift in ghostly algorithms. But the ocean. The ocean is still drunk. All the oceans of the universe: drunk. Swirling, churning, agitating. There’s nothing words can do. No edge, however sharp or dull, can escape itself. Sometime you just have to take that leap into the unknown. And the final version of that will be dying. Smell the rain. The sky trickles down singing while the sorcerers chew it into dream.