Being The Meaning I Want

This morning, being of sound mind but a little tired of the sameness of it all, I declared to no one in particular, I will be the meaning I want. And I meant it. Keep it simple, I say. These are my feathers. And these are my dreams. Popcorn is available in the lobby. Remember Dots? I don’t have those. But my thoughts are movies. Watch me turn infrared & cry. I’m signalling you from a distance. Can you see me? I haven’t thrown a baseball in years. How does throwing a baseball improve anything? I worry constantly. But the rain falls long & easy & that’s all that matters. There’s no end to it. No end to worry. No end to mistakes. No end to the ending, no end to the ending. No beginning of the end. No end to the beginning. And really, that’s the important part. Beginning is a nucleus. A little knot of sensation. Give it color. Give it words. Elaborate it. Lean to the leeward. Watch the water wobble in a bottle on the bed. There’s a full moon in the pantheon tonight. The columns are old. But not as old as the moon. Age is relative. You can be older than the body you inhabit. Do this to sagging jowls before bed (see what happens). Punch them in the face. I know. They’re committed to your face. But punch them anyway. Let you face know who’s boss. Don’t let your face push you around. Face it. Your face allowed these jowls to happen. You might try visiting a used bookstore late at night. Nobody cares about jowls in used bookstores. There are bigger fish to fry. Murder mysteries. Being and Time. Moby Dick. You could also party late into the night. Try doing it in Spanish. Or Portuguese. Some ointments work by soothing irritated skin while others work to pull the office staff out of a foreign service office, & rubbing them into estuaries. Water enjoys hurling itself into things. Faces, rocks, huge land masses. Water gets its glitter going and moves undeterred. The machinery of the mind is dripping with it. The resulting mood is an apple orchard & a front seat at the Phenomenological Frontier. It’s late at night in the library of a big university with diamond-paned windows and old books with golden titles and impressive spines. Here is everything we need to feel alive, and the ineffable charm of things. Hot showers after running in the cold have an unutterable charm that the skin understands best. Photographs of old women are charming, especially if the women in question are Gertrude Stein or Calamity Jane, who may have been the same person. Fantasias are steeped in charm and so is loam on a hill and the look of grit and sand in a street after a city crew has run a big fat hose for a long while. Hearing “Dear Prudence” for the first time in 1968. Wyatt Earp at 75 1923 sitting in a chair at home in LA looking sad, world-weary, & eerily alert.