The Theatre Of Benevolent Chairs

Stress inducts disorder. Ticks, for example, or dormers. Windows get stuck to my arms & I have to run as hard as I can on all eight tentacles until I come to an enchanted forest & jack my modulations into wax figurines. This jets through the sagas creating light. I feel the mass of an overhanging foulard swaying back & forth in perfect nonchalance, the creation of a moment whose fabrication nudges the palliation of tiptoe tundra. I spy a mammoth in the works. I feel like an Alaska of cunning nouns & funnies. Call me lapidarian, but the rocks are reciprocal & the mutinies inflated with thermometer nibbles. Primped jurisdictions in pumped transfusion.

Who was the first human to say ‘water’? And what was their word? Their word for water. In Norwegian vann. German wasser. Zulu amanzi. Welsh dŵr. Vietnamese nước. My gaze sometimes turns to the mouthwash on the counter and stays there, lost in that beautiful blue of the liquid, cool & divine. The embryo of a novel crawls out of the bottle & begins to evolve. Characters develop, ideas are floated, & night glitters in its empire. Still here? Still reading? Thank you. Welcome to the Theatre of Benevolent Chairs. There are tigers in my breath.

The gerrymander has a knob, or so they say, but they’ll say anything to get a vote, or a froth of media attention. The ebb and flow of things never ceases. The rapids are engorged with momentum. My confidence is gaudy. My skepticism is husbanded by spleen & a box of greasy pencils. The retorts are ponytails worn by redheads in a gale of portraits & teakettles. And now the salon is yawning & all the furniture is maudlin as a matinee in October. I hear the song of the cuckoo. I feel the charm of molecules dancing patterns of bone & ballet into tutu & gnu.

Thighbone jackhammer notch. The litmus you know is better than the perturbation you don’t. I’m not importunate so much as Victorian in my surgical gown & fleshy metrics. The quality of mercy is queasy, but relevant. I strain after it when the punctures are hunchbacked & monogrammed. The liqueurs are flip but the goshawks resemble harpoons. And my legs itch.

It occurs to me sometimes that this petulance may one day lead to invective. Oilcloth in a kitchen sink. Outlets on the walls of a sublet. Electricity from a wire of loud refreshment. Ears in Austin. Indigence in Redding. Holiness in Tucson. An oncoming largesse lashed to a radiant goodwill. Hula hoops are hoots. A pinch of plausibility in a play about futility. Bloodhounds on my trail. Dogs as Gods. Doodads as dew dads. Sunday lingered in glue. Manners as manicures. My feet are ok in a hotel. I have a keen understanding of reality. Until I don’t. The horizon is lined with mastodons & the midnight sun enters the song of the postman, at which time it turns blue.

Bamboo Hairdo Breakthrough

Nothing is better than improvising thought. It’s a euphoric occasion. The mettle of the mind is experienced as a phenomenology of the soul, a forge of creativity creating meaning that is constantly changing as interpretation grows & develops. One day sooner or later it happens to everybody. The forehead folds into a toaster & the mind makes up its mind to spend the day lying around or go mingle with the crowd. Hope is a painter loading phenomena into a boat for a voyage across the River Styx. This is what it looks like: a reflection on a downtown window.

One must adapt to the world in the best way possible. We kiss behind the stepladder. The world continues to turn. We hold the nipple of a wet feeling. We push it to the end of a sentence. It drops on the floor & explodes into clouds. Everything drips opinion. I encourage the park & watch the evening sky grow dark. I like to feel water by watching the lake break our eyes into radio dials. I’m undone by intending to go somewhere & then not going. Let’s just say not all ambitions reach fruition. Sometimes they feed on words & get fat. A thousand themes enliven the frogs of Texas, but I don’t know what any of them mean, & that makes the world beautiful.

Aldous Huxley thought Joyce’s fascination with etymology & words as magical powers a bit strange. Well I find that strange. Huxley discovered there an immersion in language so deep & so intense that it becomes its own reality. He found this disquieting. Not mescaline, not LSD, but language. How can this be? Language is born of absence. Who needs airplanes when you’ve got verisimilitude? This is how our biology speaks to us. Not with whispers, but burps & declarations. So this is my world: 93 words quarantined in a paragraph of glass & horseradish.

Can I have your opinion on herring? Have you ever had herring? Do you have good herring? My herring isn’t what it used to be. I often endorse stampedes of words as they gallop into my head carrying news of the outer world. The outer world is what I like to call that stipulation out there in its heavy-duty boots & helmet playing the oboe at a construction site. Harmony is precisely why I sing. If I’m feeling stentorian I will also hold moraines of hearth & heaven, cradling them in my arms like baptismal palettes, gobs of color in monstrous shawls of zodiacal vertigo. And this is what I call a quadrant, or sundial. The integration happens later, largely in the nude.

If I have a codicil I have a monocle. This is because icons flash with comical hairdos & strange epiphanies. You know what I mean. The monotony of monuments. The botany of consonants. This is what time does: it manacles pianos of sunlight to the prattle of a spectral ambiguity. Which happens a lot around here. It’s a process, not a neoteny. Neotony is not for nothing. The adolescent in us never dies. I’m sometimes so intimate with a sentence that I come to my senses at night & occupy the quiet mathematics of the air. The world of language is not its traffic lights, but the musk of its investigations. The hum of neurons mediating the smells of the kitchen.

Fricassee Of Despair

Metaphysical nihilism cannot negate the impulse toward understanding. No, but it can get in the way of carving tight arcs, smearing turns, straight lining chutes & floating in powder. A good pair of skis should be your first priority. A disinterested perspective should be your second. You’ll also need a good pair of boots, a wad of cash, & a towel for the sauna. This is how life gives itself to us: in bits & pieces of stringy incentive. Things like clothes, hair, accessories, and so on. You know the drill. We hold these truths to be self-evident: Tuscan bread is best eaten with a drizzle of olive oil, cotton should be washed in warm water, & the truth of being is Friday.

I’m not sure what to think of dance. It’s an odd thing to do. And then there’s the guy I saw today holding a device over the street, moving it along, it had a pointed rod & a meter at the other end, I think it was some form of sonar, radar, it made pretty sounds, melodic little bleeps, I assume he was trying to find a pipe, or a sewer line. So you see, the romantic spirit isn’t dead. It’s just in a different time zone. That being, of course, the underworld. Something like Florida. Or outer space. Here’s what I think: the zeitgeist needs a bath. “We are all the leaves of one tree,” remarks Thich Nhat Hanh. But I see a lot of those leaves are rotting on the ground while a few at the top are getting abundant sunlight. My point being: the elbow is in control of its own reality. It just is.

A lot of conflict emerges from the discrepancy that we have of our feelings and the material reality which temporarily gives them birth, said Lucretius. Well, yeah, I’d say that’s got something to teach me about me. How about you? And why? Why is pain necessary? Pain doesn’t contain what it doesn’t understand. The lessons of life are relatively easy. Eat well, keep warm, get plenty of sleep. Try not to kill anyone. Above all, pay attention. Notice things. Care for things. Love animals, they have to put up with human beings. I blow soap bubbles for our cat. Do thoughts have substance? In a word, no. And so I became a dumbfuck. Blowing bubbles.

No fiery declaration, no thirsty desire, no blind passion, just loyalty to a specific being after exploring the world. Isn’t that what it’s all about? I never know how to display my emotions. Incandescence doesn’t go well with small talk & wheat thins. Intensity is easily mistaken for madness. Someone may be teetering between life & death on an operating table. Above them hovers the ghost of an exuberance. The universe does not necessarily conform to our language. Consciousness is a chiaroscuro of fire escapes & alleys. This is what life does when death isn’t around. It walks around in my blood until it finds a hand & a reason to write itself down.

My first instinct in all things is to grip something & hang on for dear life. I know this feeling. It’s called fricassee of despair. It starts as a head of lettuce & ends with a new religion. A big one, with turnstiles & polo. Spinoza saw God as nature itself.  And why not? Just look at what I’m wearing. A tiara, a tutu, & a butterfly wand topped with faux gems & flowing ribbons. Now do you believe me? Grab that idea & yank it right out like a squishy mash of thought. Did you know Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car meant for oysters? A little ironic, yes, but also a little pragmatic, really. The inexplicable reconciled to the veridical.

Polysemy Park

The charm of any theory is that it’s refutable. It can be huge & ludicrous. It can float in the mind like a cruise ship. You can take it with a grain of salt. You can give it a dirty look. But one day the “why” arises & everything begins. Theories are a weariness tinged with amazement. My favorite theory is the theory that language determines & structures our apprehension of reality. This implies that if a lively language is keeping you from sleep you will awaken the next day & speak the language of dreams, which is a language similar to living in a city. At first, nothing makes sense. And then everything does. And that’s when the world is a very soft voice, lips unzipping a larger peculiarity. Kelp & Irish moss. Peter Green with a piece of cheese in his hair.

What’s the difference between a theory & a chair? A chair is a structure such for sitting, kissing, spitting, quitting, emitting, omitting & unremitted knitting. Theories are insights juiced by a spirit of inquiry. Theories are wonderfully abstract & gallant. I’ve got theories about everything. I believe that fungus has intelligence, that dunes are beautifully sculpted by the wind, & that when money becomes a deity the sublime gets buried in bullshit. New Age Silicon Valley billionaires dining on steak & lobster at Burning Man. Tent cities for the have nots. Teslas & tanning salons for the haves. And so on. Theories do not cure ignorance. But at least they don’t create it.

Death is a private affair. But not always. It impels reflection. I feel the sympathy of earth in a loaf of bread, how the universe is matter & energy, which is nice, but really, it’s mostly sourdough. You know? I can feel you under my skin. I feel you squirm. You’re thinking: who is this asshole? My brain feels gray as an operating table. Bewildering as a tumor, dusty as an old book. Rattlesnakes aren’t cruel they’re just rattlesnakes. Morality doesn’t exist in nature. Grace & energy belong to the realm of the highway. This is where words & people collide creating sparks. I just left behind a lot of ambiguity. I’m often trailed by a lot of ambiguity. It’s an occupational hazard, like polysemy. Millions of words suffer this affliction daily. Donate now.

The sun’s liquor falls into my refraction. My reflection. My misbegotten swivel. My enzymes & sleeves. The modality thickens & confesses a nibble at probability. It’s impractical to write anything anymore & so the writing has never been better. Everything’s been said & there’s nothing to say. Not saying anything requires a lot of words. Ask Mayor Pete. Go ahead ask him. I like to hobnob with the prolific. The subconscious is a furious recreation. Introspection stands on three legs immoderate trembling & Gothic. It takes a guitar to cry. But it takes a haiku to iron a shirt.

I dwell within the colors surrounding me. Once, I pulled a bronze shield from the dirt, brushed it off, & admired the workmanship. But I’ll stop fooling around now & move toward you with tomatoes & kilohertz. The external world is the work of our organs. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Appearances & dreams. Movies & pizza. There’s an energy in the head demanding kingdoms. The mind craves meaning. And the field expands. There is a chain of cause & effect. Avoid guns & knives. Consider Mahler. A vowel without a consonant is just a naked sound. But a vowel enclosed within a sack of consonants will develop a spine & get up & walk around in your mind.

Something Wet And Flowing

Sometimes the highway is a vernacular of color you don’t often find in the politics of the soul. But the gas stations are alright. You can usually find a little soap left & something interesting to read in the mirror. It’s amazing what transformations take place, what apocalypses occur when enough is not enough & variables curtsy to surveys sponsored by billionaires. It’s why I do this. It’s why I do anything. I do it for what Artaud said about art: “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

Being is ineffable. Incalculable & incomprehensible. Sometimes I will feel the explosion of something huge in my being. I don’t know what it is. I like to use the word ineffable. This would be a good occasion in which to use the word ineffable. But I won’t say ineffable. One must be careful in giving names to things, especially feelings. Naming is a form of conjuration. It is how Prospero conjured storms. Imagine that: standing on the balcony, a big stick raised defiantly, exploding the matrix to smithereens. The artist is not an army but has the strength of an army. It’s because he has the secret of death in his arsenal.

I used to have ambitions. Now I just shake, rattle, & roll. The universe happens everywhere, even in a John Ashbery poem. I like extreme, indeterminate values, but I don’t like dribbling, & I don’t like war. Daytime is not a brain. Do we really know what we want? I do. I want a nice easy death that doesn’t cost anyone too much money & a few comfortable years before it happens. Also, hot dogs & marijuana. The mind spins its webs & settles in the imagination as postulates of something wet & flowing. Something like a river. Like silence. Like sunset on the Ganges.

I know I’m wordy, but I seethe with self-importance. May I be forgiven if I duplicate a vacuum cleaner with an actual vacuum? The immemorial heartthrob of a business portfolio leaps into consciousness like a life-style & commits temperature, a big one, like a rogue mammary gland, or Wisconsin. Wisconsin is also quite beautiful, but let’s face it, the perspectives are underexposed & maraschino. It’s better to be a lisp than a triumvirate. There’s enough ointment left in this sentence to garden a pyramid with a waddle. I say let there be mastication if the sauerkraut is getting old. Bombast is but the braille of a limitless warble, & so fungal it’s funny.

This is precisely why mushrooms belong on pizza. It’s our local anesthesia, our slice of Polynesia. Big cities make life unnatural. But it’s not all bad. There are gypsies in Barcelona, philosophers in Paris. Psychonauts at the library. Multicolored lights on Mulberry. We’re all required to play a part. Duplicity is profitable. Honesty is subversive. Just look inside the bar, the conversations shimmering & blistering. Reality is perched on a bottle of nitroglycerin. Have you ever stood in a room feeling disheveled & listless & pervaded by truth? The insolence of the guitar comes naturally. Insinuation is the metal that makes pain mechanical & hot. Purpose has a nuclear core dwelling at the heart of fate. But the breath of heaven is soft as thought.

Coming To Terms With Eric Clapton's Nose

I watch a concentric bug with a prosthetic proboscis walk across the sill I like to sit by the window some people write some people sing I’m an embodiment of sugar I learned to hide my emotions deep behind my ribs it all sounds equilateral I’m curious about this music the human ear is a strange organ the tangential is tantalizing can you define reason

I’m not affiliated with any religion or ideology I want to seize the stars the camaraderie of the workplace is easily exploited why does pizza make people so happy the window in my heart opens on a landscape of error I have a tendency to wallow in remorse & put it in my hair like a big primate in an Alfred Jarry story

I like the feeling of an oar in my hands illusions float in the brain like birch bark canoes I like to crush aluminum cans the artist must work in solitude I never dreamed you could get tired of ice cream the limestone is charming words sparkling with lucidity I learned to throw knives in the circus I sometimes found refuge in alcohol this is the story of a mind flags rely on symbols but they all flap in the wind think about that think about Eric Clapton’s nose it seems to have gotten smaller over the years or did his face get bigger who cares

Arizona flies through my head maps fascinate me money kills the exquisite sense of life the blues agree with me my arm hurts when I reach into the cupboard to get a jar of peanut butter I’m building a spaceship with rubber bands & tinfoil

Isn’t it strange to live in a body the trees begin to blossom the melancholy sound of a train in the fog echoes a woman drinking water from a garden hose how is aluminum made it’s a long slow process to accept hard realities like dying or oligarchy a man playing the harmonica in the Dordogne replenishes the spirit with hawks

My arm falls asleep & I have to let it hang at the side of the bed to get the blood to recirculate eating is strange you put living matter in the mouth chew it digest it it becomes muscle & thought it becomes meat & meaning the architecture of music involves flutes ambiguity is the sauce of reverie I like the heave of waves

I often have a problem getting my keys out of my jeans pocket loose change comes with it & sprinkles on the ground I never cease to marvel at the strength of steam intensity is discouraged in our society a tube of midnight blue squeezed by an old woman’s hand I suffer from hyperacusis & am preoccupied by food insecurity it’s always cold at the supermarket I love peanut butter & jelly sandwiches the airplane sighs & moves forward possession is a total irreality

An orange is a distillation of sunlight the greater the vocabulary the greater the reality my mouth is a suitcase linen isn’t just a word it’s a fabric a fabrication a feeling folded & put in a closet the frame is at least half the image rivers are beings each day I notice a new wrinkle plantar fasciitis is a bitch what more can I say the armchair emanates the comfort of sitting in it the glow of gold at the bottom of a lake words overlap the border between the real & the unreal here in the U.S. you’re evaluated according to how much money & property you possess so does it matter if the scenery along the highway is beautiful no because it’s not going to be there long

Inspiration is just a matter of breathing the universe in the human body is full of water & salt it’s our duty to appreciate the value of rumination then let it go not everything happens in sequence brain waves float the language of the sun a dream of iron salutes the mountain at dawn life is unpredictable you can’t define everything with a beer mug the thumb is the chandelier of the hand the plough revolutionized agriculture & there you have it the impregnable politics of the polka dot I do push-ups & trumpet the piquancy of rhubarb stick figures walking on paper it’s a pornography of linguistic pricks small wounds expressed by spit & polish until the limits dissolve & the universe comes flooding in  

Go Ahead Spit It Out

Go ahead spit it out the splendor of Mallarmé is in the boomerang the elliptical the oblique the allusive the revelatory & the trapeze swings back & forth with nobody on it I listen to French radio in the morning it helps to find people of similar interests speaking a language different from that spoken by last night’s furniture dancing around the room like mirrors ribbon tossed in celebration everything in the Mallarméan universe is broken & fragmented because the words are so strained & contorted by the intense push toward the jubilant arbitrariness of the night sky they’re so hungry to ingest

Age is a development toward deeper understanding I never underestimate the convenience of the extension cord Anubis drives the bus there was a time when conversations were a form of chamber music imagine the wind with elbows

I remember driving to the dump on Fridays the sparkle of frost on a January morning Bob Dylan Barbara Lewis Lou Christie lightning is striking again each word is multilayered and clanks the sting of an insect is a form of conversation the skin of a drum can be rubbed into softness we see hummingbirds sometimes a bottle of tornadoes high on the shelf we’re all trapped in a cage of our own making

I live in a port city the limestone is an eventual feeling can you feel the universe swimming in your veins I’m a table today I’m feeling flat multicolored snakes writhing on a snow shovel

I’ve got a swimming pool on my mind the subtle rustle of gauze in a Central American jungle I’m going to toss it to you this sentence is striving for diplomacy Stephane Mallarmé throwing dice in a Tegucigalpa bar

Redeem the face of conflagration I’m already gone in my head the helium morning awakens the leaden meaning of sleep it’s a hard line to walk

Let me chew on that a while the sentence is a cocoon of idea the mastoid is the bone behind the ear we’re all depending on a system that’s killing us I got this sound from a beef bone commodification poisons the inner beauty of things spectacular events in an armchair sunlight diffused in a curtain

Can you introduce me to your elevator a carload of rubes from Redding threw a beer can at me as I crossed the Sacramento river I should’ve gone back to get it take a big gulp there’s salt & pepper in the cupboard but you’ve got to know what you’re doing evocation is at the heart of the screw

Mustard is a stimulating word the world is full of them big words little words fat words thin words if I personify a clock does it help make time more intimate no not really but what the hell it’s only breath & sound I spend half my day moving phlegm around

The sternum is a bone joining the ribs of the chest there’s an eyeball pinned to the end of this sentence the faucets are widespread mounts I was hitchhiking from San José to Seattle when I discovered the enchantment of mistakes the world is becoming increasingly stiff rigid cold & hostile the crows all gathered on a telephone line about 20 feet above me cawing their heads off they were trying to warn me of something this is getting serious I learned to play cards in Sioux City conversions sometimes happen slowly over time sometimes all at once when you least expect it things evolve slowly but inevitably we live in a time of extreme confusion upon spiritual matters but spring is coming I see spots & expand my interpretation of glass to include the glamour of two big eyes glowing with mischief

It’s a bit weird to be at the end of one’s life it affects one’s psychology that’s for sure there are 20 bones in the human foot each one doing something clever & flexible I became athletic late in life the greenish debris is the subconscious of the junkyard I’ve never liked horns as much as strings & percussion I have a map of your eyes a 93 year old man walking gingerly with ski poles let us join our hands in prayer I’ve learned to read the faces of the other players we’re stuck in a small apartment in an expensive city description is lumber constant interruptions caused by bodily needs an old oak desk penetrates infinity what is it that makes the skin of the lips different than skin in general wrapped as it is all around the body keeping all the organs in alchemy bursts into beams of light the springs of our mattress squeak & there are so many things you can do in the air breathe & talk & sing & fly & leap from branch to branch the runway is clear you can take off now