Running For Cover

People have become grenades. One sneeze & you’re dead. Jesus. What a world. How did it get this bad? And another part of me answers “are you kidding?” Space is everywhere. But there’s a general understanding that unites everything in cotton. It happens this way in water. Which means that the body is its own continuous surge of meaning. I fill with a thousand obscurities. Zigzags & crags. The world is a summons. The body is a witness. We rise & give testimony. It spreads me into being. Like a gunslinger. You sneeze, I cough. And we run for cover.

Will there be an end to this? Will we ever return to normalcy? There. I said it. The ‘n’ word. Which doesn’t exist. Our imaginations have been forged in chaos. But I’m not a banana. I’m only a crumb in a sourdough world. Some cells become neurons & some cells become kingdoms. We’re water balloons held together by sticks. But a vowel enclosed in a sack of consonants will develop a spine & walk. And that’s called adaptation, which is sensitive to evolving variables. I’m not sure what to think of it. Of what? I don’t know, pick something. The pyramids of Egypt. The sky is pink & friendly. That’s where I want to be. Up there. Shaking hands with the sun.

The theorists seated like Rodin's thinker leave me doubtful. I’m in favor of a traveling thought that lets itself be contaminated by the street. Do you feel appreciated? Loved? Can you find love in the street? Yes! No! Maybe! I don’t know. But take a closer look: the white snow mountain in the center of this sentence depicts the land of the great nation of Tibet. Perhaps it’s there that you’ll come to the six red rays emanating from my Aunt Winifred. Did I say Tibet? I meant Timbuktu. And driving back from Chicago I heard the Bobby Womack song “It’s All Over Now” for the umpteenth time & took stock of life’s flavors, its bittersweet consistency & goo.

That funny blowy sound a bottle makes just as you bring it to your mouth & the air from your nose goes into the bottle & back out as a funny blowy sound, is that the rapture of the air as it glides in & out of a bottle moments before I rub my mouth & close the refrigerator door, or is the ghost of Socrates running at me like a blind, red rhinoceros pounding the hardened earth? We’re all going a little silly these days. It’s all this confinement. Though I wouldn’t call it confinement. I’d call it ideal & get into frame of mind I can take somewhere. This is moving in a good direction. Some places you can only find within. I can’t say what it is. But it won’t be Tulsa.

I like doors. I like opening doors. I like closing doors. I like painting doors. I like the musical group The Doors. I like Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. I like juxtaposing doors with windows & the big mahogany doors of Federal buildings. Revolving doors confuse me. Doors in literature include the wardrobe door to Narnia, the tiny door to Wonderland, the door in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden & the two famous doors in Frank Stockton’s short story “The Lady or the Tiger.” I rarely slam doors. The peppermint door to salvation is a mammogram of softness & bulk & opens & closes quietly. The Door To Furious Conclusions opens to the Chamber of Arbitrary Discrepancies. But don’t open this door. You’ll wake up unhinged.