Hegel's Pocket

Poetry is best achieved by a return to childhood. And then you get rich. The money just flows. Bubbles, all of it bubbling, all wrong, all stupid, but globules of vague green narrative bobbing up & down in your mind. I have a thin piece of word. It was put together by monks 2,000 years ago. You must glean from yourself the nurturing knots that come undone like hair. And then walk backwards out of the horror of eternity. We would all like a hole to crawl into. I can sprint toward it & speak another language. I can jump in & out of time. I can show you some feelings. This is one is blue & spins around shooting sparks, & this one lurches toward you like a Saturday night in Australia. 

     I take balance very seriously. The last time I lost my balance, I sounded like racketeering. Income inequality is grotesquely asymmetrical. I’m stepping up to the plate to defend the problem of civilization. Let’s start by taking it apart. Water, dirt, minerals, forests. Godzilla with blonde hair & a fake tan. Maintaining power is easily exploited. Musician Patti Smith was asked what advice she had for young people trying to make it in New York City. Get out. New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling. New York City has been taken away from you. 

     How do you make something free of chaos, something all pattern & control, control of the pattern, control of the sounds, as in a symphony, but still have the beauty & thrill of chaos? Here’s what you do: get out a tin sandwich & play it like you’re Charlie Musselwhite. Or be flexible. A muscular mussel with musical instincts & a rubbery soul. Everything in the quantum world is elastic. Stretchable, like human skin. Or thought. Or ideas. The void is full of consciousness. Whose consciousness? Who knows. Maybe it fell out of Hegel’s pocket. 

     I’m a little nervous about where this sentence is going, where it’s going to go, once it gets written, once it comes to an end & there’s a period & a chair at the end, or at least another sentence able to continue, able to complete the thought of the first sentence, before it got lost in its flowers, lost in the hypnosis of flint, guano on a boot, in the whipped cream on a slice of pecan pie, in articulating the rhythm of a man getting into a red Mazda while taking a sip of universe, & turning bright with the wonder of it all, & feeling that sentence dissipate into stars. 

     The hammer is immersed in its purpose. But I can’t give it to you. Not in a real way. I can give you anything as long as it’s an abstraction. Abstraction feeds on reverie. I can afford that. Anything more expensive will have to soak a long while in someone else’s phenomenology. Who knew that everything in the world was so delicately interrelated? This is why all the electrical cords get tangled. We all correspond to something. My fingers drink the heart of the curvilineal. The body embodies a choir of correspondences. Mountains & rivers without end.