River Of Bells

My excitement stipples the Atacama desert. But this isn’t Chile. Nor are we in Paraguay. I’m using a spatial allegory to sigh your anger. We shall be in unison. Singing. Gushing our emotion. Finding salvation over the conquest of the merely clever. Cement this by triangle. Then hang it from your chin. We shall assemble this experiment together. Sew. Run. The knives will fit our delectation. Our aim and roundup. The moon is lactating. It remedies our burns. I see leaves everywhere now. I feel like being close to my heart. Tumbling in my room. The resilience is ravenous to pound along the maiden grass until the morning. I grip the sky. I grope for measurement with an equanimity. The air is 20 gallons thick with gospel. I’m this serious. So swollen I drag a pullulating orange through the emergency room. I packed a few flashing lines in a paragraph of rural indemnity. It’s raining in the next sentence but you can stay here until the orchards boil. I feel photogenic across a daub of interpretation. Toss that can. The altitude has shattered my dancing. We’ll need both of our hands to feed the River of Bells. Who are you recruiting to represent this ginger? I’ll be looking everywhere. I shall muse on the mystery of hallucination. My favorite odor is whirling around my mind like an implication. Polish this ooze. Flip your body over a curve. Let’s catch this edge together. Spur the despair. We’ve got a long ride to Tucson. See that book in the backseat? It’s flowering. The words are blossoming into abstractions. Independence did this to the panic soap. We exaggerate our income. We do this for very obvious reasons. One of which is hotels. Another is laid with iron nails and wooden ties. The locomotive invites science. I toss a few emotions into the sentence to make it curve upward. My grip adjusts to the resistance. Your metal is erect. Your scorching assurance entwined around a pumpkin. I spout a weight for the guitar. Everything is a cause of music. But music itself stirs far beyond the potato field. It hangs in the sky, cool and euphoric, like a rainbow in the Rodna Mountains of Romania. We were born before the wind. You know? The bass has a jaunty rhythm, although the melody is wistful. And when that foghorn blows, I’ll be coming home. But no. I don’t live in Romania. I live in a hummingbird. I cut the funnies into little placentas where the word balloons repeat the morphogenesis of propane. Little blue flames lick the grandeur of purpose. I do believe we can find some redemption sooner or later. Hug Paris. It’s beautiful, but sad, like the gargoyle on the top of the Saint-Jacques Tower. The red development leads to a blue envelopment. There’s a bulge in my sack that does this by giving a new heft to the morning. I see it in the mirror: a mask with an animus. Just like reality when it mimics a haircut with shag.

 

 

 

 

For Its Own Sake

When the external turns internal the internal turns nocturnal. The crickets get thickets and the classical gets radical. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Is the sound the spoon makes when I knock it against the rim of the cat food container while trying to get the gooey little cubes of salmon off of it. Then I rinse it and put it back on the breadboard for future use. It’s a continuum. Of action. And satisfies hunger. Thus it came to happen that I watched Peter Jackson’s Get Back movie on YouTube and wondered what theatre it will be in. There’s only two in Seattle now. Jesus the Beatles sure had energy. And what appears to be an infinite ability to put out great innovative songs. It would’ve been terrific to see the movie at the Seven Gables, which was a tiny theatre with a huge lobby. There was a backdrop where the curtain came down a painting of two lovers on a stone bridge between two mountains and a deep ravine below and a huge castle in the distance. It was fun to stare at and imagine a story that might fit that scene and give it momentum and flesh. Or marvel that there was a time when romance still had some currency. If, for example, you allow that external reality is more than matter, and put the threshold of inner and outer in imaginary space, which is a different reality, and irresistible, considering its boundless dimension, you imply that skin is the connective tissue between being and reality, and so incur the euphoria of mass, when it has no density, and is a field of electrons in drift velocity, amorphous as a rag, specific as a flag. The T-shirts I folded last Sunday are still on the bureau. A torrent of documents and bills reside by a straw duck repurposed as a basket. One has to believe that this world has a rear admiral at the stern guiding us through dark times and melting glaciers into a future of calm lagoons and tropical flowers. The reality is, of course, something entirely different. It’s not a rear admiral it’s a nihilistic priest in a black robe and the boat isn’t a boat it’s a raft and everyone still clinging to it is desperate. And yet the voyage is magnificent and full of marvels. Go figure. All pain is exquisite. It is a hallmark of existence. The sensations on the outer surface of the skin are different than the feelings within, the proprioceptive third dimension and the rumblings of indigestion and the hum of circulation and the giving suppleness of the body to the pressures of gravity and the support of the floor, or a chair, or a bed, and the more chimerical moods and reveries that shift and churn in the chambers of the mind and heart. It’s that magnificent difference that generates all the energy, the desire to meet those charms with one’s entire being and attention. And this is known as weight. Which is a product of light. 

 

Life And The World

Life and the world, said Shelley, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. I agree. It astonishes me every day. As soon as I awaken from a deep sleep and begin to feel the first sensations that peel back the chloroform of unconcern and bring me into an awareness of that powerful thing called life, I scribble my way to the surface and allow the phenomenon to take hold. I begin to focus and assume its burden of worry and how to get on in the world and meet its demands while fulfilling the needs of the body and the needs of the spirit. I marvel that I understand so little of it. But there it is. The onus. The bonus. The semiosis of life implementing its array of words and grammar in a carillon of appeals and prayers and sanguine propositions in order to make it seem a little more manageable, a little more endurable. In this latter sense, almost all objects are signs, standing, not for themselves, but for others, in their capacity of suggesting one thought which shall lead to a train of thoughts. And where does that get you? Nowhere. The universe is much larger than a dictionary. And its grammar is one of gravity and space and time, fusions of atomic nuclei whose differences in mass generate heat and light. It’s a very funny thing to realize that the life inside you is a piece of the universe itself speaking and breathing and creating itself through you. And this reverie, which is the abode of poets, arouses a thaw, a dynamic liquefaction, a feeling of dissolving into the universe while simultaneously absorbing, imbibing and harmonizing with it. Indeed, what a strange state of affairs. Because it doesn’t get you off the hook. You’ve still got to get up and get dressed and brush your teeth and brush your hair and go out into the world to learn a trade and make money and submit oneself to the dictates of others. Shelley, I believe, was an aristocrat. He didn’t have to suffer the indignities of a shit job, though he was subjected to a lot of bullying at Eton College, which led to his aloofness, and rebellion. His violent rages earned him the nickname Mad Shelley. I can dig it. I’m in my elder years now, but the water still boils, if you get my drift. I got licked on the face by a dog today, and that helped bring my feet to the ground, and still the waters of my inner being. So yes: there are things, remarkable things, that can feed one’s being with sensations that lift us out of ourselves, that existential separateness that ferments in us like a wine and gets us drunk with ego. You want to avoid that. Try psilocybin instead. Or raise horses. Be a cowboy. Ride the range. Everything gets wide and borderless under the stars. And when the wolves come out to howl the universe quivers like a contralto in a convenience store.

 

 

Where Are We Going You Are Already There

I’m the biggest shadow of myself I can find to simmer in total sleeves. My blossoming happens in states. Some of them are Florida, others drill homeward in daintiness and pith. Meanwhile, the disease of life is sifted syllable by syllable until the vowels rattle and the consonants dribble birds.

When the play begins, a man is swallowed by a whale and the sugar inside the crab makes a good breakfast. Hamlet wears bombs of language and the sky sits down on a population of twigs. A brown eye sweats to see a sternum in the hand of a surgeon. Nothing is mirrored. Everything is mud. My reflections twist the knots undone and I can go home humming pieces of air.

Don’t shoot the watermelon. Shoot the debit engine. I need to write the statements into pins I can poke with balloons. Let me be clear. But only when it serves a rose.

The winch must be protected at all times otherwise the bacteria bounce. There’s simply no other way to lift the meaning of this sentence out of the sink and get it oiled. No distraction ever did anyone any good what wasn’t already embedded in themselves like a redwood. The impact can detonate you. The rest of the problem is solved by committing longevity. The beauty of the hand is its cardboard subconscious. The brain hangs freely from a predicate dripping opinion.

Metaphors taste like shaking. And I hear everything as it curves. Or dangles. I’m waiting for an extension to be more pailful. The sheen is gained by appointment. Gravity likes it when contact is thrown apart in celebration. There’s a bottle after it sparkles. And one that pours shorthand.

Eat this. It tastes like words.

Fighting is explicit. It gets over a bomb and explodes into meaning like a cocoon of fire. The excerpts prove the reflections are this tall and no murmur can surround them without light or torsion, which is voluntary, like incompetence or wool. A bulb there is that likes a pickle. You can put this sentence by the flower and it will dilate into magnetism. Or, if the night is haikus, you can climb into one another and create a convocation of squirrels operated by needle. Everything that is daily will one day turn nevermore and bubble in retrospection.

There’s a tease in the furniture that causes violence with the hands. Subjectivity mimics itself in sleep. These are called dreams that get you out of yourself to rule an empire of wood. And then a secret breaks its feathers on a brain.

I think I like a sandstone piano that makes me mink. A push-up lies in wait on the floor. I pick it up and push it hard out west to California. Our abandonment is heaving forward on its knobs. The prairie gives this indigo. It lapses my tryout. It makes my implications leap into eggs. They get hatched as turntables.

The formula was puzzling until we discovered its echoes. Death is spicy because sidewalks. The brushwork gets fatter when it loads up on viability. Instincts walk among us like stiff cloth. A cram scrams. And a camera equals opium.

Time is a mask that space projects in flickers of gulp.

My jacket has a glaze. I think it’s morning walking on a shovel. The nouns all gather in brick. It stirs me to the bone. My eyelids grow tops. Yesterday I had a brush with reality. It left me feeling spontaneous. Every word is here to perform its bubbles. My knees just had to churn to the music of it, the juice of it, the bells and ladders of it. And so I accepted the elevation as an example of nature. The rocks held on to their silence. The sky meandered among its clouds. I could smell the tinsel of their noise. Nothing exists that doesn’t inflate with color. Even the knife has a voice. 

 

 

 

Welcome Mat

Just noticed that the welcome mat in front of the door upstairs has three arrows, two pointing west and one pointing east. Why arrows? Is this a sign of welcome among some tribe of people, the bow and arrow people, the people who go in all directions at once people, or the befuddled and troubled and bubbled up from nowhere people? Our mat just says welcome. And you are. Whoever you are. Look at my saddle it has a pommel. Look at my horse it has a rich white mane. And I ask myself what if the role of consciousness isn’t so much to enable you to do things but to encourage you to do things. Or to mind about things you otherwise wouldn’t mind about. At the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania, a chimpanzee was noticed emerging into the open in a thunderstorm and dancing and screaming and stamping on the muddy ground as torrents of water streamed down his back and lightning flashed. Is that not a form of ecstatic consciousness, a deeply rooted bond with the external world exploding in a rapture of fevered relation? Rapport. Concord. Reconciliation. Or is it more like King Lear, feeling the sharp tooth of ingratitude and wanting the blasts of a hostile universe to cleanse and awaken us to stronger, higher, more powerful forces? To feel yourself exist, even in pain, isn’t that the goal? Well then, welcome. Welcome to life. Welcome to string. Welcome to snow. Welcome to fire. Welcome to uncertainty and long trains clanking across Kansas. Welcome to Kansas. Welcome to Wyoming.  Welcome to sludge and tiptoe and twinkling. Have you noticed? Friends tend to disappear. Death claims them. Ambition claims them. Children claim them. Duty and impulse and betrayal claim them. And have you noticed the excitement when the device on your lap buzzes? What’s that? That’s called expectation, and comes wrapped in a placenta of hope, like anything with a pulse, and a history, and a song to sing. And have you noticed how irritating and comforting folding clothes can be? How filling a room with heat in early October can lead to writing and wine? Or the awkwardness at being at a loss of words in the midst of a conversation that developed out of a casual encounter in a crowded room? Or the baptism of hot water on your face in the morning followed by the routine of brushing your teeth? Or the exquisite terror of a roller coaster making its first steep plunge? Or the imperceptible drop into sleep, which I’ve never been able to catch.  That beautiful dissolution. That wonderful unraveling. And welcome mat at the gate of heaven. 

 

 

Terra Incognita

 We have echoes and jokes. Our very arrival has wiggled the flow of conversation. Language extends the life of the armadillo by giving it powerful legends and blood. And if I abandon the plot, I find my wallet helps explain the curvature of space. Congeniality streams with deliverance and the reflections roar with mass. 

Correspondence spouts from a building of dirt. A watch on the sidewalk infringes on perspective. We cut time out of gravity and hang it from a nearby turret. Toys the parlor whispers squeal with writing. A naked emotion talks its way out of a catalogue of horns.  

This is real timber. The timbre is enhanced by obbligato bassoons but the timpani is plunged in bows. Monotony makes everything sway. I pull a sandstone mongrel out of a jabber of wind. Arizona is a version of this which then becomes tactile, a twisted trunk on an anonymous hill. 

I meditate my hunch until it embodies animals. The garish we soap by conquest. We are the altitude we fall from until it’s so big the wash becomes a thesis. Each little excerpt pleads for composition. I float beneath myself holding a shield until the air begins to supply us with words. 

I gut the opposites which probably leads to baking. Or banking. Only destiny matters. It’s a real power, the biggest dissonance I ever carried, and it strained my back into coils I can now call pearls. Go ahead, fondle the anarchy, we are its veins. 

It’s the junkyard so I snap myself at bumpers. It makes the kind of sounds I like to scratch when I’m ruminating on explanation. If the circumference is dry the pi is juicy. I learned this by constraining the most beautiful things to escape with the next train of thought. We thwacked our doctrines as we stumbled through Sedona soaked in aroma and were shattered by its solace. 

The eyeball spoon expressed its seamlessness by winking and circulating its plasms. I thought I saw a drug there but it was only a reckoning. Death auditioned for its own autobiography but the role was given to a crackling red feather plucked from a body of prose. We cried to vanish so that we could contact it. Electricity sat alone with a stethoscope awaiting outlets and plugs. 

Pour the fidgeting where we can push it into further description. How else can a clarinet get a hold on a tube of music if not by buttering space with the gristle of an oboe. It’s time now to pack my intention and come clean about the postage. You’ll need a stamp for the postmortem. I don’t know what the truth is I think it has something to do with the ash awakening in a hibachi. 

It’s a strain to talk, a bit like wrestling, only the significance is wetter and spongier. Somewhere beneath all my turmoil is an apparition awaiting a mythology of shirts. I like to give everything at least one subversive flavor to bring to the surface. I drag a monster out of my heart and dust it with summer until the machinery of language smears us with hallucinations. And sit back and listen to the rumble of a dishwasher and whatever drifts through my head gets a thrust of thought.

This Time Around

This time around I’d like to write 

In a lineated 

Barn the swallows 

Fly in quick tight turns 

And dives and the straw smells 

Of straw and there’s no other way to put it 

Human beings die from lack of contact 

With the real world blackberries 

Grow on thorny vines and it’s a mess

To disentangle in the mind 

For example Paul Dirac

Observed that God 

Used beautiful mathematics 

In creating the world 

And is the preferred language 

For describing swallows 

Unlike the cubic crystal lattice 

Where gravity condenses matter 

Into galaxies stars and swallows 

Behave as if nothing 

Existed but air 

The blue globe of planet Earth 

And Dirac so loved Cher 

He bought a color TV 

And watched her adoringly 

In the sweet Florida night 

Massive particles spin 

Around an axis of love 

As Cher sings if only 

I could turn back time

Words Of Fire

I’m sitting by a fireside. The logs are logogrammatic. It’s an imaginary fireplace. But with a real fire. I swear it’s real. It’s burning the words down. The words I put on the fire. That I started with words. And couldn’t stop. So now it’s everywhere. Can you feel the heat of it? It blankets the mind in supposition. And then there’s frost. Those mornings when you want to get into the car and get the heater on but you can’t go anywhere until the frost has been removed from the windshield and the engine hasn’t been running long enough to produce any heat so you have to get out and look for the scraper and scrape that frost and ice from the windshield and it feels good to do that and get back in and start the car. This is what you do in the northwest. Adapt to frost. Adapt to rain. Adapt to ice. Adapt to damp and cold and solitary pedestrians distant and unapproachable in their introspection or conversation on a wireless phone or fairies and elves who knows. It’s the northwest. Kingdom of moss. Realm of mushrooms. Home of Grunge. Domain of the Dark. Long cold nights and omnipresence of all the oceans of the world. Everything moist and steaming and slippery and delicate as those fronds on the Jurassic ferns. And I keep wondering what exactly it is you can do with words. They seem to confuse things more than clear the obfuscating air and its 7-11s on foggy midnights near Aberdeen. The warmth of an animal speaks volumes. Concaves are conversational. Presentiments stoop to the truth. Which is a caterpillar spinning in dreams of fruit. Which is a fabrication. Internalized by an internist in Issaquah. Studying a new disease. Which happens to be on my mind today. Issaquah.  Not disease. I don’t know how it happens. How the mind’s focus drifts so unnoticeably into the ether of reverie. Maybe it’s the weather. The caprice of a gas. The whim of the wind through eelgrass. Maybe its’s the mountains. They don’t look like themselves. They look like the Wasatch in Utah. Like the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico. Even the Olympics are bare. The gods are naked. Bare as a rock. Granitic splendor of whatever intelligence in the soil makes volcanos vomit fire from subterranean realms of a molten heart. I remember the immensity of Notre Dame cathedral and how those vaults inside seemed to ascend with limitless force, and that I was standing in a mountain of stone, an edifice erected to counter the miseries visited on our kind. I heard recently that the ability to tolerate uncertainty is a mark of maturity. If that’s the case I’m still a child. I have a hard time with uncertainty. Of that I’m most certain. I’m just now learning the art of Negative Capability. Trying to accept the improbable, even before it’s probable, or solvable, or anatomical. It’s all just grass, in the end. And the wind in the trees. 

The Medium Is The Milieu

I’m invested in a milieu of bone and blood, a simian exposition founded on a principle of flexibility, the cartilaginous column providing robust passage, a conduit for the melody of nerve & spinal cord to flow through the musk of our mutual understanding. Can I say it any differently? The how and why of the marigold, the ounces of math left on an unzipped testament. The parabola of the sky trembles like sugar in the shoes of articulation. We see this hunkered down in the shadows and leave it to the jaywalker to figure out. We don’t talk about it enough. This dazzle, this interrelation of things played out in moss and mushroom. The musician must understand the music of mustard before she can understand the needs of the cello, which are werewolves tempting the favors of the moon in the grain of the wood, and come out in deep vibrational fantasies of perpendicular lacquer. Everything is a matter of breath and furniture. The substantive is a bullet. To be peripheral is to be figural, a daydream laid out before us like a mound of applesauce adjoining a mound of mashed potatoes. I feel the edge of the world in the breath of the morning. The dizzying liquor of possibility. That moment when everything is so clearly delineated it could never be a song. It could only be a weekday, a frontier with a schedule in it. It’s hard for me to say this but the truth of marble isn’t in its density but the nobility of its influence, how it affects the hands when you’re leaning on it to gaze at yourself in the mirror wondering who the person might be behind that face in the glass. This is how tedium becomes a medium for nitroglycerin. The hotel is a rationalization. All this luxury is supercilious, but we all need a place to sleep. The theatre, on the other hand, constructs an emotion so large for us to go home with we can barely contain it, which was the point of drama in the first place, absolution, catharsis, but what we ended up with wasn’t Centaurus but a colorless planet called Deputy Jones. When last seen, it was holding a glass of wine and wearing a crown. This was out by the Kuiper belt and I was still in my underwear when I drifted into a field of introspection. One can find paradise in an almond and the sound of the word staircase is in the ink with which it’s been written and then used, step by step, to take us into the attic where we talk of feathers and evolution in the fog of conversation. Images are the shadows of a brighter reality. The fire is behind us. The shine of saliva reflects the intensity of our vision. The darkness is animated by a crystal interior. Everything is an instance of poetry. But not everybody sees it. Kiowa hunt buffalo. It’s 1854. Arthur Rimbaud has just been born. Franz Liszt’s Orpheus premieres. A philosophy walks out of the sun and splashes down somewhere near Omaha, which has just been established as a trading post. Essences are axles. But it’s the wheels that make things roll.