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.