Monkey Bread

Can a place exist where nothing exists? Does a place require a something to be a place, a glass, a table, a spoon? Quantity, quality, quarks and quartz and warts and remorse? Is remorse a thing, or a phenomenon? Do phenomena have thingness? I’m getting carried away. By a host of demons. The demon of analogy. The demon of opacity and the demon of loquacity. We are now in a place: the void of signification. This is where words collapse into sound. And the sounds abound in chains, the clanking of syntax and its many links, revealment in concealment, daybreak breaking the film of a daydream, so that the images flicker and fade and reality enforces its order among the grease stains and hydraulic jacks of the local garage. Udders hang, swollen with milk at the dairy down the street. I don’t know what town this is, but it’s a place where nothing exists. Nothing, that is, but trailers and irrigation ditches. This might be nothing to most but it’s a haven for a few. And this divides us. The people in spaceships are billionaires. The people below are hurting. Poetry, that enduring species of glowing grotesquerie, survives by feeding on nothing. Poetry loves a void. This is where nowhere finds its journey. Where words are combined according to laws of their own invention. And later, around a bonfire, it is decided that Led Zeppelin’s first album was the best, and that money generally ruins creativity. But how? How does it do that? Money shapes behavior, pulls it back from the waves, and orders a Madeira. It tames the spirit. It taints the mind. And the Madeira is delicious. Delicious to flirt with disaster. I was once proud in my poverty. Now I just worry. The current zeitgeist is a fat orange man everybody purports to hate because deep down they love him. Hence the journalism of our age, its cowardice and vanity, its sycophancy and larval teeming on the corpse of democracy. This is why, to borrow Stein’s words, there is no there there. There, where there was once a place, is now a desolation. Imagination is the gate into paradise. Go there. Follow it there. Anywhere there is looseness there is profuseness, and lucidity. Ragtime revivalism. Honky tonk donkey walk. All the excitement is on the outskirts of town. This is where spring visits the bee in a carriage of pollen and the blue plumage of the sky rims the summit of a volcano, where the pyres burn all night to make the hardships beautiful. Where the subtle rays of the embalming sun at twilight knit crosses across the sediment. Where lucidity is a passport and Lucinda Williams sings “Magnolia.” This is the place where nothing exists. The splashing canary is my comrade. Admonition crashes down the street creating suggestions, evocations we take with us back to our room, and promptly ignore the urgings of common sense. The storm renews the hibiscus. Lightning juggles my head. Here is where the heart beats, and the roads are mapped in infrared.