A Life Of Its Own

I confess, I’m not a modern man, nor an ulna in the waist of a garbage collector. Nor do I have the unreasoning sluice of the urethra at a rock concert. These things are called phenomena, & are impregnations of the subjunctive when it arises in frequencies too thin to take seriously, & yet powerful enough to bring our senses into the arena of existence, & split light into colors. The bazooka, for example, is ruled to have a symmetry like no other in the empire. If you combine a lap with gospel you get a terrier. And this matters. Because the syllables are entitled to hydrogen.

This is what words do: they prove imprecision by implication. And imply tricks. Pulling rabbits out of hats. Pulling hats out of rabbits. Then leaving stage in a huff. Which is a form of puff, or puffin, or muffin, or twinkle or something. How is your pension? What’s going on with the unions these days? The proper equation for the angular momentum of trailing vortices went by a minute ago followed by three angry Irish women.

Does everyone have a cave in them, place of visions, light flickering on the walls of the brain, which are begrimed with the soot & ocher of ancient chimeras? You never know what kind of animal you’re going to find behind someone’s eyes. Or is it all just balloons? Like the ones in comics. Dialogue going on in a cloud above the head. Imagine the plays that could be written based on somebody’s inner dialogue. Don’t panic if the immaterial materializes. Celebrate the fact of your existence. The drapery redeems the view. Go. Embrace your shadow.

The painting has a life of its own, said Jackson Pollock. And so it does. There it goes now, strolling through the gallery with a big cigar in her mouth, for she it is who walks in majesty like a tuber, a potato at home in dirt, but mnemonic as a knuckle, & twice as twill. Even twilight isn’t this unhinged. Victory goes to the willful. But willfulness goes to the melodious. Who are standing outside in the rain, singing “Good Vibrations.” The fact of the painting, said Turner, is in its impact. Does it brew in pungency like a dusty ocher or does it grant sensation a soulful awakening in Ravenstone? I think it’s a cow. Staring at a prescription for fentanyl.

We are then treated to footage of tanks & men marching in the street of some foreign city. Does any of this make sense to a cow? Prior to arriving in Melbourne, we all gave one another a hug & a kiss, then sat back down in our seats & buckled ourselves in for a night of turbulence & recrimination. It’s dark inside your head, you know? What lights it up is interplay, surgery & randomness. The best places are always postcards.

Seattle is the largest & most-populated city in my tent. The city is located between Puget Sound & my will to bear discomfort. It has scenic surroundings – mostly mountains – water bodies - & glitzy displays of largesse. Mostly bullshit futuristic architecture but with the charm of a robot doing a funny tap dance on Jeff Bezos’s balls, a.k.a “The Amazon Spheres.” Seattle has numerous attractions, even in its outskirts, where you’ll find cave dwellers mingling with dinosaurs & fire breathers making change with their minds. It’s a corporate filet mignon with a side order of tax haven fries. Grinning sociopaths stroll past forlorn tent cities smartphone in hand big grins all around save for Crazy Jane, nibbling a soggy cheese sandwich in a door entry. “For Love has pitched his tent in a place of excrement.”

San José was no picnic either. All those freeways, all those chronic conditions & friendly staffs waiting to hand you an application at the desk. It can seem pretty soulless some nights. A lot of twinkling lights, but nobody really home, if you know what I mean.

Most of the time lately, my mind is on the old west. Can’t say why. The more in the direction of the 21^st century I travel, the closer do I feel to the 19^th century. Not so much Paris, as I would hope to be, but the mountains & prairies of the American west.

They say Wyatt Earp carried a ten-inch Colt. And spent the winter of 1872 living in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois.

Earp met Doc Holliday in Texas while on a trek to capture a gang of bank robbers led by Dave Rudabaugh. Bat Masterson, who didn’t care for Holliday, said “Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man…. Physically, Doc Holliday was a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fist fight, pointing out that this was why Doc was quick to go for his gun when threatened.”

And it’s often so hot inside the old west the pictures all have that sepia tint & the faces all look somber, as if to look anything else would be a sin of some sort, a lynx prowling the margins of a poker game about to turn explosive. The lynx is a device. But the joker is wild. We can hear an owl hoot inside the menu of a sound floating by, there’s a special on scallops. A man in the corner is playing Bach suites on a cello. The gunslinger is due any minute. We all look anxiously east for the stage to come tumbling down the side of the mountain. Most of all Socrates, who believes the truth is a Colt .45, & keeps everyone busy with an endless stream of questions.