A Diamond In The Mind

It has often been my opinion that the color pink leads to metal detectors, ultrasound, psilocybin, peyote, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The romantic spirit isn’t dead. It’s standing right there on a stepladder. Installing a simulacrum.  Something like Egypt. Would you like anything? A glass of water? You’ve come this far. You can call an Uber if you want. That’s the end of the sentence. But it’s not the end of the story. The story needs fire. What is desired, what is most needed right now, is an art that smells of sacrifice. All sweet things that come from the air merit the dance of paregoric, the blood around the bone murmuring softly like coal in the pursuit of beauty. There’s beauty in dishevelment, beauty in punctuation, and beauty in light, but does Daylight Saving Time really matter, or is it just malarkey, a fruitcake feeding on lilacs? Matter doesn’t always matter. Not when it’s fluid. And there’s a strange music in the air, teeming with qualia. That’s when matter becomes a matter of experience, of essays, copulas, and process. Intensities mingling to create a momentum of unicorns & broccoli, chimeras stitched by hand. It feels good, that sudden contrast between the coldness of a glass of water handed to someone and the warm of their fingers. And this makes me undressed. Naked as a description. The poems of Emily Dickinson may be found in the glove compartment of my thumb. But nothing can replace nothingness like nothingness, or fill the hole in a lie with another lie. Redolence is not always red but the lips are supple when they find a purpose to what they say. So here. Have that glass of water. Glass & water provide impetus & context, but the water cannot be contained: the water is wild. It carries things away in the current. Squirts from a hose, sprawls into bayous, & roars as it falls from an edge of rock & plummets into the river below, the mad foam of the mind, in which it floats, and together become waves and eddies, each particular, each peripheral swirl. If you compress a body of words hard enough with your mind, your concentration and focus, will it produce a diamond? What kind of writing would that be? What would it be called? And would it even matter in a postliterate world? Always keep a diamond in your mind, said Solomon Burke. Not sure what he meant by that. But I like the idea of it. The idea of it glitters. The idea of it is multifaceted, if poorly understood. If I shake my head can I hear it rattle? How much could I get for it? I don’t think that’s what Burke meant. Who once stopped a tour bus by a mortuary because his band didn’t believe he’d once been a mortician. So they followed him into the mortuary and he showed them how it’s done. It’s done with great patience & care. There’s your diamond. Think of it: the hardness of life, but also its maddening distinctions, its fluted bottles & newspapers. If you ask me mysticism smells of semantic shellac. Some things are transparent & some things are more like the soughing of willow. That's why I'm laughing at the road. It’s so adorably hypnotic.