Nothing To Get Hung About

Optimism is hard to sustain in a world gone mad. Despair is easier. How is hope even possible? Hope is over. Forget hope. Hope makes things heroin. The rhythms are fat, like units of mechanical power, & tight as skin. Once everything gels, the day begins to boil, & the narrative arc of our lives get wrinklier & awkward. I can barely stand coherence anymore. It’s goofy to fuss over feelings. They never make any sense. Words are insects, a dung beetle singing alone by a psychiatrist. When was the last time you sat at a small wooden table covered in oilcloth and thought about the humbleness of legs? And then bent down and picked up a jet-propelled reason for everything. What if meaning were a bunch of beans wrapped in a sound like a tasty tortilla? What if your ears jumped off your head & went swimming in some nearby music while you slobbered over a bean burrito? I feel the exultation of stone. This happened once in a dream & another time in the open where the words appeared to carry it away in a circus. No gun is truly cosmetic & the grammar is sad. Meaning is hard to find when it’s sewing itself up with rain. It is not my objective to be obvious. We all want liposuction. But how many among us are willing to renew the moonlight in our minds with a seemly seme and a seamstress? Wave your hand. I think that’s our taxi. Now sit down. I want to tell you something. Nouns are knots. Periscopes. Knockers. We occupy a world connected by hearing and smelling and tasting and sight, images that gleam in the sun like dragonflies, regrets and memories that create a landscape of willows and brooding clouds. The trick is to never hit the ground. Today I feel a little hypnosis around me. My underwear helps me understand spitting oatmeal at the windshield. Most religions travel at an average speed of reverie, which is a daydream of everything sordid and poor becoming blessed, John Lee Hooker dancing across the stage in a Brooks Brothers suit and a bowler hat, shooting lightning out of his guitar. In Indian thought, the word darshana means "point of view." Knowing how to vary it would be a way of approaching the complexity of reality by escaping binary logics, to the point of accepting the coexistence of opposites in the world and in oneself. To understand it, must we experience it as a revelation. Or can we learn it? If the imagery of war enters here, it’s fake. I’ve never been to war. Never fired a machine gun. Never threw a grenade. My war has been fought silently in rooms. The war of the imagination, as di Prima described it, “the war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it,” and I believe this is true. When there is rage in a populace just below the surface, graffiti on closed up stores and people living in tents, there’s been a war. A very evident war. Mass shootings. Shock. Disorientation. Women walking down streets without pants. Smartphone zombies in a trance. When was the last time you thought something contrary, something unpopular, something full of rage & suspicion, something destructive, something negative, & held back, because there was a smartphone in the room, or a laptop, or a PC, & they have microphones, even on or off they can’t be trusted with your privacy, & so you held back, said nothing, or diluted it a little, made it a little more acceptable, adorned it with qualifiers and rationalizations & made it a little blurry, a little equivocal, just a squib, a carefully edited tweet, & felt diminished, a little less alive? I think it’s time to start talking about Umwelt, semantic blobs of nothingness. But don’t overdo it. Don’t swallow the universe. Concentrate on dopey Joey’s aioli. And nothing to get hung about.