Leaves Of Hair

I was eager to see the shadows lengthen during the performance of Richard II. The only shade available was to the far left of the amphitheater & was already fully occupied by a group of people. I was wearing jeans. How is it possible, I wondered, for that big gold thing to go on exploding & exploding without, you know, exploding? How does that happen? But I still look up, squint, take a quick look, & worry about what would happen if it just blinked & went out. Fun things to think about before a play about the fall of a king begins. The sword people bowed & left the grounds. A woman with flaming red hair began pounding a drum. And the play began.

Curaçao is blue in the red house of logarithms. Cognition is mostly ants going off in all directions. Cosmetic is a Greek word. So is cosmos. I go outside to see what asshole is throwing cherry bombs in the parking lot. There is salvation in stars. But not as much as you think. Singing is different from thinking. Here I am listening to Blondie sing “Heart of Glass” & writing sentences as if anything still mattered. Ask a scientist what is the nearest habitable, earth-like planet & you will not get a direct, specific answer. You’ll get analogies & probabilities & multiple uses of the magical word “if.” This isn’t singing. Or thinking. It’s just words put together by monks 12,000 years ago. Illuminations. Floating amid the thwarts of a Viking ship.

I’m just wondering, now that you’re here, what things are transparent & what things are not. Age is revealing in interesting ways. Everything else is preposterous. Why did this particular shit happen? Sci fi is good. Smartphone zombies. Walmart mobs. Tent cities. What does it mean to believe in something? The theme isn’t pizza. It involves capillaries & dots. Heidegger had his ideas. Who can function without water? This is another thought, a shade of inquietude I call men battling the flames of a wildfire. It’s hard to get to that place where the coyote stops & stares.

Resilience is good. Try that. Try anything. Write a letter to Iggy Pop. Do you like doors? Write to Iggy Pop about doors. We will summon Iggy to the garage. We will crash into ourselves. The poet is a nomad with nowhere to go. Poetry is an engine of ice at a Cincinnati gas station. Which I later pumped to the surface of my skin & showed it around town like a tattoo of shadows boiling in the midnight of a woman’s fingernail. Think of it as symbolism, something out of the late 19^th century. Can I offer another version of myself that explains these things? I am you. I am us. I am her. I am him. I am everyone. But mostly I’m a guy looking for a way out of here.

Gravity has a cure for science. The mind lifts itself up. Zen mosquitos on a hairy arm. The lure of Titan. Buffalo on the plains in 1752. I’m just tossing things out now, hoping one of these noodles sticks to the wall. Is that a propeller at the end of this sentence? If something falls I’ll catch it. I care a lot about quality. Like the moonbeams that wandered out of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley & appear to be lost. Maybe that’s why there’s an unseen power hanging around in here. It’s looking for something to do. This happens a lot in poetry. Drugs can be adjectives. Nor do I think it necessarily wrong to attribute self-awareness to water. It seems to know what it’s doing.