Swizzle Stick Physics

I wish I could reach out and grab time and pull it back and keep it from moving so damn fast. I feel like I’m sitting in the cockpit of a formula one car on a highway toward a fatal destination. No U turns. No exits. I’m not even driving the car. I don’t know who or what is driving the car. I’m just a passenger. I don’t even have a map. Or a spare tire. Don’t get me wrong. I think the universe is pretty. But it’s moving too fast. I want to sit by the side of the road & read a map. Or Jack Spicer. Is there a Jack Spicer Atlas? Where are we, Jack? “Be there / Like the earth / When shadow touches the wet grass.” How beautiful that there is such flux in the universe. Skates and glamour and heraldry. Time isn’t just so much gobbledygook. It has a pattern. Infancy is being seated at a table, childhood is the aperitif, adolescence is a trip to the rest room, adulthood is the main course, late middle-age is the desert, and old age is the bill. And here I stand on a March afternoon, a glass in one hand, sponge in the other, as I do the dishes, and attune myself to what is at hand. Click of the plastic Ocean Spray Cran-Cherry bottle after I stomped on it, reducing its volume before tossing it into the recycling bag. The bottle returns to its original shape. Or tries to. Reminds me of an afternoon in a hotel cocktail lounge with my father and him gazing at a swizzle stick and bending it and telling me plastic has a memory as the stick resumed its original shape. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, say the Buddhists. Open a photon, and what do you see? Energy oscillating in waves. Dark energy. Dark matter. Antimatter. What an ancient hole. This shiny black imaginary cave. Right there, under your skin, is a bonanza of art. I think of feeling things as an art in & of itself, especially when a machine can do anything if it’s monotonous enough. Sometimes I want to tell a sausage something & then I forget & say to myself oh for crying out loud I smell existence. One day you’re writing so many ideas that they bang around in your skull like a maraca on meth & the next day there are horses. That’s pretty good. Thank you, language. Thank you for consciousness, lumberyards & fog. The lighthouses have been displaced by modern technology but the shores remain the same, water whispering into the sand, making rhetoric on a rock. It’s winter. The sky speaks to us with traffic lights & spaceships. Welcome to Planet Earth. It’s really great here. We’ve got elephants, savannahs & Bluetooth. We listen to podcasts. Queen Mab discusses glittery human skulls & Denmark with an expert on crustaceans. I’m feeling insolent in my ramifications. I’ve been here a long time. Life here is blunt & complex. Even the pancakes are served nervously. Self-awareness is experienced with words. This led me to write with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. I’m hooked on polyphony. The ricochets go better with prose. But the games are played with jigsaws, our drinks are stirred with swizzle sticks, which make the equations tremble, & grow into thunder.