Timpani Epiphany

There’s a meaning pinned to this word. If you look closely you can see it. It has a plume and a reflex and an escalator. I think it means quack. I think it means process. I think therefore I state. I make statements. I like pointing things out to people. Over there you will find a sink and a faucet and a piece of infinity pregnant with gobbledygook. The edge of a lip is a listless sample of feeling. When the mouth opens a sentence comes out and stands in the middle of the kitchen looking for something to eat, anything, gerunds, participles, predicates, predicates are delicious this time of year and go well with garlic chicken rigatoni or any word salad. A predicate can move me to make a noun open to its pedals and operate like an empire. It occurs to me at times like this that I’ve never thrown confetti from a window. I thought that would be something I might do one day when a team of astronauts return from Mars or a deranged hydrogen jukebox ejaculates prisms of music while being pulled by four white unicorns down Manhattan’s 2^nd Avenue. This image came to me in a dream and took its clothes off and crawled out of my brain all slippery and wet. It gets odd at times like this to wander around an education feeling the throb of its effervescence turn into something helpful and rectangular for the palliation of the masses. People who get married during the winter are bold and daring. This is to say that there’s something about an intensity that leads to revelations of nutritious obscurity and a bride and a groom in a warm Wisconsin church while outside the winds carry the sharp stinging cold of a universe that nobody fully understands and that for all means and purposes is utterly indifferent to the fate of humankind or the frowzy gentlemen in the corner eating a piroshky rather clumsily. He looks at it curiously, as if, by penetrating its interior, he discovered a word with a meaning pinned to it, and the word was piroshki, and all was good with the world, and the embryo of a gentle emotion flapped angelically out of the mouth of a six-year-old elephant, and hung in the air, dripping predicates and musk. And I am reminded of butter, and the gurgle of water down a drain, and that first moment of weightlessness that occurs when a word, any word, is opened and inside we find more words, and each and every one of them coated in epilepsy like a musical instrument, a cello bowed by lightning and that old wood so full of music it swells into timpani.