Dark Places

There are authors that are drawn to dark places. Subterranean places. Chambers & labyrinths. Pale blind fish. Stalactites & Stalagmites & Stag Parties & long nights stumbling from bar to bar in places like Milwaukee. Which is Algonquin, & means “pleasant land.” I’ve never been there. But my imagination seems drawn to the place. So if I follow it there, what do I see? Breweries. The Harley-Davidson Museum. Boarded up stores. Hit by Covid. A vampiric Wall Street sucking the country dry. 

        Funny what a little idleness occasionally might reveal during a time of crisis. A taste for Chopin. The Eagles. The reluctant realization that I like the song “Horse With No Name.” And to think of all the David Bowie songs I have a hard time genuinely liking, because I liked David Bowie. And almost embarrassment at realizing what a profoundly tragic & moving song was “Alone Again, Naturally” by Gilbert O’Sullivan, which the Bee Gees brought to fame in 1972. I don’t know how many times I must’ve heard that song on the radio without hearing it at all. It had an easy listening vibe, so I dismissed it, relegated it to wallpaper. It had some remarkable lines in it: “But as if to knock me down / Reality came around / And without so much as a mere touch / Cut me into little pieces / Leaving me to doubt / Talk about God in His mercy / Who if He really does exist / Why did He desert me? / In my hour of need / I truly am indeed / Alone again, naturally 

        Poetry makes nothing happen. Said Auden. But Auden is wrong. Poetry causes texture, or text, which is a form of grapefruit, a sour orb of peculiar ecstasies. This is errant, I know that, but I’ll proceed, I feel things happening, I tighten my belt buckle & can feel the persuasive force of that. The implications are clear. There are no impediments here, only dervishes & sewing. Though really, not much sewing, I’m trying to make things happen, really happen, the way things were meant to happen, which is to say spin, lots of spinning, & dizziness, which can lead sometimes to a strange clarity, an explosive awareness that erupts into a flowering of meat & romance. 

        For example, can I knock on your door? If I knocked on your door, would you open the door? But if I ignored your door, would you be upset if I walked in? Walked into your room. And if there was no room? Because these are words & not actual entities. An entity is a thing with a distinct & independent existence. Is there anything like that here? Not really. Nothing independent here. Nothing here, in fact. Except nothing. Nothing is a not thing. A thing with a distinct & non-existent existence. So that once again in the lunatic realm of language something that is absent becomes present & anything present is in fact absent. And this is how I go about opening & closing doors. 

        It takes a ton of tuns to tunnel a tune. My heritage merges with flutes & faces the indefinability of being. Not that I have any choice. The sounds people make when they entwine themselves in bed are the nutrients of a unanimous disorder. The stream goes by in a limousine & waves like Bette Midler. Here on the rue d’Orsel we spout parables, pillows & metaphysical endeavors, such as posing for centerfolds. These activities are available in Technicolor. Big fat sentences squirting morality & barbecue sauce. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I prefer allegories to alligators. I don’t like things crawling out of swamps & chasing me. I just want to live in a world where all the phenomena drift through me like giants lifting the ocean into rain.