The View From The Back Of My Mind

The store is never closed at the back of my mind. Thoughts are stacked like dishes on a drunken boat. I like diversions. The Ganges flows in my blood. I’ve got eight arms and a voice like Iggy Pop, which is tricky, because I can’t sing. But once my instinct for speech has been triggered and I’m feeling a little blue I can chatter like a chafing dish in Chattanooga. I once meditated on a pillow and suddenly I found I was flying around the room with big swollen fingers and a red brick. It’s always exciting to leave the earth behind. It diminishes into a little star and I see the ways of the nail have to do with well-placed blows. I like circles with red bark and botany and whistles. Even quarks have charms. I’ve been ghosted so many times I feel like a phantom. All I ask is to be exhumed. I will lead you to a body of evidence in the mouth of a dollar bill. Have you ever heard a train signal in the middle of the night? My seclusion is gargantuan. But I like it that way. I do a lot of deep study and if I see a broken string on a guitar I will be a teacher of entanglements. I’ve been to Bihar and seen its many buttons. A Hindu swami with bony elbows and a twinkle in the eye once told me that if I ever enter a village of parallels I should keep my analogies at room temperature. Time is a door. One it’s been opened, the movie can begin. The color of expansion fills the screen and the conditions on the train are luxurious. Even the folklore surrounding dinner has a scent. And why shouldn’t it? The snow is transformative. And the washing machine is ageless. The lines of a poem should weigh like a tidepool between the lips. The mind is a drunken boat. We fix our coordinates around certain expectations, then launch ourselves into the river with the darkness wrapped around our waist. The night is a mélange of dripping stars and misshapen metaphors smoldering among the bones. Gypsies doing flamenco around the fire. Polymers forming resins. Here I am in my robes of science. But what good are they? I feel naked as a punchbag on the bright side of redemption, and simple as a blade of grass.

True

If required a bobblehead needs a stick to get the storm across. There’s always an echo following the perception of self. I bungled the ablution but made up for it when I bent the sky toward Texas. I’m not against biting a chronicle if it serves the needs of breakfast, but despite the polish of the stove there should be more light in the window. My sleep blasted the slide into smithereens. The water crashed against the winch and my eyes caught it full on. Shout cartwheels when there’s enough faith going around to believe in our parliamentary fury. It will ease the moment when the structures of old age prove queasy. Squeeze the stimulus, don’t let it just sit there. We’re the crackle of ourselves. The copper harmonica issues hints of nomadism. The winter hymns warp the melody and certifies the lingering patterns that pulled the final notes across the horizon. My smear of life fulfilled the pull of night. I saw an alligator swim through your skin. And after a compelling indentation I felt the need to ponder the oddities of an ancient hammer. I banished all paradigms from the spin of our wild float. Grace is a mockingbird below my soul. Think of it as an excerpt of inner fornication. Follow a trickle beneath the chin and go mingle with the spectators in their presumptuous milieu. Lucidity excels from its bungled attempts at tile. It swans to me against the verdict of walking. A basket of emotion is sometimes left at someone’s doorstep and as it solidifies into sumac we study the biology of the Fauve movement. I don’t pay enough attention to linen. I like to explore a clutter now and then. Drink blazes of henna while segments of gravity move along a wire of lovely cognition. What war ever solved the problem of utopia? Will it ever exist? Can you kill a dream? Here: pepper this paddle with the salt of salvation. Move it back and forth. There are proverbs for this. And the power to trudge through the mud of the estuary, where the light spreads itself everywhere evenly and true.

It's A Lonely World

It’s a lonely world. Everybody tries to hide it. But it’s there. The void. The question is: does the void exist? Or is it just a feeling? It’s difficult to say that the void exists, since there’s nothing material there, no dimension, nothing to measure, no time, no space, no nothing. Therefore, it doesn’t exist. But does it? Does it not exist? That dog don’t hunt either. Because the void has properties: it’s finite (otherwise there’d only be emptiness) & it’s a medium where interactions, fluctuations, indiscernible disturbances take place. Quantum particles flitter in & out of existence. Energies interact. Nothingness teems with perturbations. An atom can spontaneously emit light. Electric fields pulse. Nothingness is fertile in somethingness. But tell that to the guy walking down the street on a rainy night in lower Manhattan, or a woman weeping on a couch in San Francisco. Empty bottles of wine on the table. A wick spluttering in wax. What does the void matter to her? Are there quarks in her tears? Are there gluons in her hair? And who is this person I’ve invented? Maybe it’s me. We all assume various forms in our dreams. The whole gestalt is you, everything in the dream, you. The wallpaper. The furniture. The octopus eating cornflakes at your table. The void tonight is serving sturgeon. Word salad with pecan vinaigrette. Here. Have a bite. You eat it with your eyes. We’re sharing the void. Words love a void. They echo like items in a navy surplus store. Lewis Carrol trying on a pea coat in front of a mirror.

Piccolo Pickle Pop

It’s exciting to burst into Picasso. Eyebrows orbit the face. I can hear the crackle and twinkle of rumination. A red energy remains to develop snakes. I have secrets that I must clothe in rawhide. Abstraction is helped by a skull. I have one in my head and another in the glove compartment. One is capable of thought and one just likes to eat. I’m a worried man. But there are things that I can chop into empire. I can toss myself into my bones in the morning when the light breaks apart on my face. The ego is just an assembly floating in gentle Technicolor. When I open my ocean I feel evasive, but in a good way, like minerals shining in correlation. I once saw Bob Dylan climb into a song. And when he reemerged he had a simple aesthetic, a blonde toaster with a blue jaw. I know the stove is crayon but don’t let that fool you. All the nouns are neon and all the verbs are joules. Imagine Jupiter. Tie clasp open to gold. Not everything is money. Some things are mosaic. Meanwhile the metamorphosis rips us up. We stiffen and grow glasses. Cry kerosene all over the nails. Diffuse elevations. Life is public above Portugal. I like to attract nutmeg. Apprehend henna. My plugs hold the electricity in place with glue. Representation is largely an art of situation. Light punches its way out of the goulash. Words swarm around my arms. I can admonish nothing without a little juxtaposition. It haunts the chopsticks. Your travel shines infrared. Winces with tread. Sunlight grasps a paradigm. Chops the battle orange. Incised pop. My warp bends the nebula. We climb into our gloves. The dripping trumpeted the granite over its mountain. The squeeze articulates the walk. Winter details our cotton. Picasso flows a spoon. Minerals glow in the black light of speculation. Poke the stove phantom if you want to see this pie become nucleated. The proverb spreads thinking. Perceptions pickle. Red light ensemble that we play with four cellos and an obstacle. The indicative carves the steel on a copper lobster. Feathers aim at flight the way an anonymous pain assumes the delicacy of kelp then drops it. A change in the jug luxuriates in shadow. The smear pump is sweating. I focus harmonies by amber. Cabbage gargles the landscape. I’m feeling a feeling around a hirsute sorority. A radio sleeps our properties. A green glow twinkles. Bubbly faucet drool. The pavement shoots at aesthetic. The shop’s dynamic depends on a brush. One must accommodate propulsion if one plans to dance with a salamander. Jump into motion like a magician. Twitch a little. I water sense on a railroad. Shake and grab the steam. I’m jaunty as a clapper in a red bell milieu. And blue.

 

Phantom Descriptions

I sanded this paper with a bone to make it smooth as death. But who wants death around? Let me propose a balcony instead. What is it eats grunion among the elevators? The tennis courts are fierce this afternoon. I put it in my pleasure bank. The sting express is piquant with a vividness I agree to develop as soon as the emulsions gel. I like to sand things and have a device that fortifies grammar with the euphoria of contempt. The hills bark and shout. I’ve rounded the weight of a stem with an opulent grebe. This should prove that the etiquette of coffee is true to consider in real life situations. The collisions have stolen the dry-cleaning, but for what purpose, nobody knows. I just stand here holding a zipper as the dawn burns its way through the night and stands on the crest of the mountains with a giant emotion. All morality is charcoal. You see it in the embers. And in the steam of absence. The phantom descriptions of fish scales and Delft dinnerware. I drink it all in and mingle with the guests. The nails diffuse into a house. The hand walks its greed across the paper. Greetings serve the planets in a story by a man with unpredictable glasses. The horse spins when I throw the ball. Pepper denies its frame. One expects to touch the spring until winter kills it with summer. The spectral fat of a full moon drools first aid kits and French ochre shows how the octagonal intentions of a moose in papier mâché jumps the ritual shark of perplexity with umber elbows and a passionate orchestration. What a crazy sentence did you see that bus go by? I could swear that was Little Richard at the wheel. He grinned and waved and turned left on Tutti Frutti Avenue. My belt buckle roams its patterns while anchoring my pants to the piling of my legs. Think of me as a wobbly dock, or a sorcerer raising a bowl of combs to the goddess of hair. If I press gravity lightly it menstruates space. You can see traces of this on the tablecloth and there are marks of battle on the halibut. The blood of the palette carries a gaze. I’m braced for the rumble of articulation. The morning moss demanded a green paddle and then fell on the driveway. This is how airplane fragments create poetry. Inflate a lobster and what do you have? A compilation of itches scratched by parody. The sound of the word ‘knife’ on a cotton highway. I remembered how the spoon slumbered in its metal until the custard found its magnitude. The great battle between sugars and proteins was quicker in Montmartre. The mockingbird glowed on my sleeve as refractory butterflies fluttered in strangeness around the central jibe of their otherworldly static. The harmonica is an engine of peace. I pull the enmities out of themselves and bend them into goats.

 

A Little Attitude

I like circles. I prefer circles to squares. I can’t say why. It’s a geometric emotion. I like circles because they’re simple. And because they can be pies and wheels and faces and plates. Squares are a matter of real estate. Squares squire the commercialization of space. And that’s not good. Circles are the face of spheres. Spheres are the ultimate fulfillment of the circle. Spheres have body and volume. The fur of the sphere is the fire of the sun. Newspapers are square and sour as sauerkraut. Nobody likes the news and yet we all hunger for it. This is why the news is square. When news becomes circular it ceases to be news. It becomes ovulation. It gets to be eggs. Eggs are the news of the new as the lapel of a coat may be pinched by a tailor. Magazines are square. Buildings are square. Chess boards are square. Squares have four equal sides and four equal angles. The rectangle is not precisely a square but it has four right angles the same as a square. I think of the rectangle as an elongated square. The parallelogram, on the other hand, is a quadrilateral with two pairs of parallel sides. How does that make you feel? It makes me feel parallel. Parallel to a parallel. Which is to say side by side with a refuge and a thaw. The refuge is made of letters and the thaw is the softening of structure. These are parallel circumstances. Language disguises things. But if you look closely you can see that the refuge of a fiction leads to a softening of the attitude. Attitude is orientation in space. In mathematics, space is a set, sometimes called a universe. I don’t know what the universe is. But I’m certain it’s not a square.

The Price Of Life

The price of life is precisely this it has been discharged by a perturbed astronaut who is yelling away to stimulate change. These are pieces of my life what a residual effect it has had consider the lily it’s moist as the belly of a swan. This is a widening perspective they swim around you these perspectives the raccoon for example is vital to the ecology of this sentence as it spurts from the ground. My thirst is nailed to a eucharist. This was once a palace and now it’s a story about the unpredictability of life. My name has been dampened by utterance. This was supposed to be my retirement. It’s yellow because it’s a firmament firmly fermented in Portugal grapes. All these words have been strewn naked on the shores of Illyria and now everyone is in a race to climb Mount Analogue which is located in a different geography, somewhat like a spider walking across a cracked throne. If you’re going to wear a necklace of garlic you should also learn how to give birth to yourself. It’s rained all day on that cake outside and it’s turning back into butter, returning to the same canvas that was there when the heat was on. We were a thrilling ride in an amusement park of our own invention back then, when everything began blowing west, toward the horizon. Such are the pleasures of the spout. The scene dissolves now into almonds. Buffalo Bill sitting on his horse in the tall grass near a cave bleeding echoes from the prehistoric past, platelets big as planets are not entirely true to the proportions of nature, but this isn’t the Smithsonian. Think of this as a simulation of time collapsing on a generality. After all, I’d like to remember something about you. Like it or not, the propane is not a list of vacation destinations. That’s not what propane is for. Retrospection thunders in us like angry customers in an appliance store. Frugality is a lobster dancing on a string of words. Insects have little to do here except be insects. Do what comes natural. Why is punctuation always shrugging? The period is a bobblehead on a dashboard. You never know when things truly end. They always tend to keep going. It’s the nature of things to keep going. None of the photographs understand Rimbaud. Did he sleep with a cherry? Did his sheets in Cairo shout with softness? The hoe is a garden implement. Hope is a mental implement. We use it to turn the page to a new chapter. Each rivet holds the narrative together. Everything is soldered by spell and incantation. We do this to fish the redemption of Hollywood out of its impending obscurity. The flood of dots that was once Dagwood. The night usurped by dawn. Tufts of mint. Meaning lying fallow in a furrow of words.

 

Return To Xanadu

I think words are bones. All my power resides in the stars. This is the century of celery. Belly of Laughs must go into the jelly fish because those spheres are blue and there’s not a mint so much as a drop of blood. These are the feathers of a pharmaceutical thesis. Thus begins my emission. I have a commission by omission. Time convulses with daybreak, a collision of words creating papyrus and prayers, a prompt arrival from the angel of again and again. I’ve tested a door more than once by opening it. If there’s a goldfinch in my glockenspiel I can’t say why. But I can say the Greek Ships sailing this way navigate in a cave bursting with light. This was once the glory of the movie theater. It was a wooden bank with wooden money I once saw fly over Belgium like a plump whisper. Go ahead. Shine a light into the cave. I know you want to. The walls are covered with animals. They’re astonishing, like the horses in Corot. There’s a new curl to the universe and a puzzle made of murder. As you can see, I live in a house of dribble. It’s all cause and effect around here, axiomatic as a new jackknife. I still have something to say about society. I’ve lived through much of its history. I’d say more but my train is coming. Just remember. Grief is a galaxy of tears. I can smell Chicago. Half of me widens and half of me narrows. Reminds me of a sepia photograph of my grandparents. Or that time I saw peacocks in the parking lot near Stonehenge. I’m always on the qui vive for a gem or two. Sometimes I enlist in armies. I can’t do without raw umber. I know that. But here’s the deal. I need a chain of harmonies to dangle from my neck. It gives me protection. I’m superstitious about thunder. I feel incidental around orange. Properly speaking, improperly speaking is still a form of speaking. And this is a century of war. I’m hindered in my ability to fondle a sound. So please. If you could just move a tad to the side I’ll get up and get going. I can read the crash by the variety of parts strewn about. And you call this a language? I guess you have to call it something. There are only so many ways you can talk to an orchid. Me is in relation to we. It’s all very much like a Bob Dylan song. Rain on a junkyard engine. And the tomatoes are ripe. Think of the metamorphism of rock. It’s quiet as a dead democracy. I agree the moon is a broken comedy. Sad like a pouch of hammers. Splintered like the ideas in a library. And a lack of control. It’s a recipe for stars. My ribs display this hunger. My dream of mosquitoes confirms it. I have a refractory attitude toward linen. When it’s exhumed after many centuries it will appear as lignite. But I believe in roots. The forge has rippled my shirt with smells of music. Heavy metal. Though not entirely. Some of it’s light as a collar stud. Or a pygmy marmoset. I’ve got a gift for you. There’s no better way to propel a sentence than by flying. There’s a new vein in the fork. Shoes include tongues you know. This is my fourteenth day walking erect on the ceiling, my head upside down, all the details of my life unraveling around me. That’s a wheel over there, the blue one. The one rolling toward Xanadu.

 

 

As A Matter Of Fact

A fact is something that is true. A fiction is something that is nocturnal. When a fact and a fiction come together the result is superfluidity. Dark matter and antimatter. There are truths in the Bible that are undetectable in a particle accelerator. The God particle is a metaphor for the Higgs boson. The truth it reveals is that subatomic particles acquire mass through interaction with fields of energy. Truths emerge from the fracas of facts. Truth is collision. Facts are the quarks. 

A fact is something that actually exists. A fiction is something that explores the mutability of truth. The kangaroo, for example, is neither fact nor fiction but a marsupial enhanced by the addition of a woop woop. If I make the claim that there is a kangaroo hopping around in my brain this doesn’t mean that my brain is Australia. It simply means that in a linguistically charged field a lexical set of semantically related entities can assume the form of a marsupial. This is particularly true if the words are boiling and the fact that things in this world change causes the coconut palm in your hand to squirt thorny tongues of metaphor at a greasy logic. 

“Do facts,” asked Hannah Arendt, “independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all? Have not generations of historians and philosophers of history demonstrated the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data) and then be fitted into a story that can be told only in certain perspective, which has nothing to do with the original occurrence?”

Consider the aforementioned kangaroo: is it wearing a hat? This is an important question, because the single fact of a hat can live in the mind like a synergy of bonbons and clouds. I believe in the juxtaposition of hats if the hats are in a row, but if they are not, then I must wear them one by one, in the same way that a series of facts might culminate in a fiction, and create theater. Theaters are to facts what facts are to fairies: a curious glow at twilight.

Facts never win arguments. People reject facts. It happens all the time. Why do people reject facts?

Facts aren’t the solid bricks of information we think they are. They’re contingent. They’re relative. They’re as elusive as glasswing butterflies.

I was born August 23^rd, 1947, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is a fact. It is also a fiction. Minneapolis is the name of a geographic location. But that’s all it is: a name. August is the name of a month. It, too, is a fiction. The 23^rd is a number, as is 1947. These are contingent on a system of measurement that was invented approximately 6,000 years ago in Sumeria. And that’s what they are: an invention. Numbers were created to answer the question: how many? When humans cease to exist none of these names and numbers will have any existence. They will cease to be facts. They won’t even be a fiction. They will be nothing. Nothingness is the fact of not existing. But how does one go about confirming such a fact? If something has no existence, then what is it? It doesn’t have it-ness. How can it be a fact? The it-ness is a fiction. One can imagine something not existing, except oneself. Try imagining yourself with no existence. Be a fact.  

17^th century physicist, chemist, inventor and natural philosopher Robert Boyle created a pneumatical engine to create facts. The machine was an ontological metaphor that produced empirical results. The machine consisted of two main parts: a glass globe and a pumping apparatus. It was air-tight. This was crucial to producing a “matter of fact.” The principal fruit of Boyle’s experiments was to prove the existence of a “void in void.” In other words, a vacuum. A vacuum was, at the time, considered impossible. Boyle proved the actuality, or factuality, of a vacuum. He also discovered, by means of this machine, the inverse relationship between the volume and the pressure of a gas. Boyle’s Law, P₁V₁ = P₂V₂, has helped scientists comprehend and predict the behavior of gasses ever since.

Creating a fact is hard. I can create almost anything with words. But I don’t know how to create a fact.

Thomas Aquinas famously said: “Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus.” In English, “Truth is the equation of thing and intellect.” To which I say, good luck.