The Politics Of The Soul

Am I sentimental? Can’t say. What is it to be sentimental? It’s all a haze, I’m a guest here, a listless straw bending out of a glass of root beer, the trill of oblivion bouncing on my brain. The stencil is a novelty. My revulsions are inscrutable. But not always. Sometimes the highway is a hypotenuse and my turbidity has a value that only the night can reveal. That’s Vegas ahead. The play of lights is a good indication of a geometry inverted to shine brighter than a joker masticating a slug of macaroni. You can’t duplicate the dust of an ancient library. Just take a volume down & open it. It says that the lechery of any given moment is an endowment pranked to impress the gullible. I’m putting all my money on Foment. Gray is a vernacular of color you don’t often find here. But value it for what it is. Value it for its blind spots & vagueness. Gray is forgiving. Mournful. But redemptive. Intrinsic to the politics of the soul. 

There’s a princess sitting on a toadstool, spreading her ledgers out for all to see. Planet Earth is essentially a tabernacle where these things happen. Things like vagrancy & quartz, jelly & remonstration. Janis Joplin. Etta James. Nina Simone. Delicacies leap from subtlety to outright inundation. We could all use some fireworks occasionally. Editorials that remember what it was like to drive through Iowa protesting the results of a caucus. We’re all involved with the universe. How can you not be? Lives are illegible until the harmonics of our language find their radar & the mechanic finds a cracked head gasket. I don’t expect any answers. But I could do with a towel.

It’s amazing what transformations take place, what apocalypses occur when enough is not enough & the variables curtsy to questionnaires posed by billionaires. I’ve seen reciprocity turn to atrocity, verbosity trend toward monstrosity. This is what happens in a universe of flux. An aggressively friendly realtor staggers through a door of flippers & bells prattling of faucets & bathtub tile. This does little to promote calm & balance. Even the squids wear spurs. And when, for the first time, you see a tentacle reach for a bottle of whiskey high on a shelf in a San Antonio bar you wonder if it’s fair to berate yourself for being so insecure. And sip another apocalypse.

It’s always a bit strange when you see a waterfall of hair & aren’t sure whether it belongs to a woman or a horse. Perception is rarely a neutral registration. Most of the time it’s a dilation, an elation creating sparks & havoc. The news of the day propelled by unicorn. The world wobbles. I warp into nouns. I jingle them like thumbs. Each claw must open a door to let the monster out. I do this in my spare time. This is how elbows happen. It’s athletic to appreciate vineyards. Grapes bring us perceptions of another world. This is by now apparent. The hammer is defined by nails as music is awakened by piano. And this generates the words I’m using to peruse your eyes.

It’s why I do this. It’s why I do anything. Hysterectomies & liposuctions are just the manifestations of a trademark mortality brought to us by life, which is a form of existence, which is a form of grizzly, a big furry raging appetite high in the mountains of an imaginary realm I’ve just now squeezed into this sentence, which is just now reaching a conclusion, though maybe not here, it’s rolling up & down the neck of a guitar in a parallel universe bristling with unimaginable possibilities, the kind of thing that happens to you in a state of mesmerized abandonment, or C minor on a slide guitar.