Start The Sugar

Ooze keeps Thursday to itself. This is a problem. I have a mound to build, treasures of Anglo-Saxon anxiety to bury in repose. Shivering swarms of frankness flame from my embalming machine. I preserve carrot clouds in the right pocket of my vegetable pants. Admonition demonstrates lungs. Therefore, the tiger walks through the forest, but the power to stew remains plugged into my martini.

What is logic? I will tell you: it happens during the season of carpenters, when they have their visions, and pound nails into the air. Great cathedrals are built from this strength. Cathedrals of air. Vertiginous. Buoyant with faith. And tax exemption. Dumplings ripple through their own reality under a gravy of backwater shade. It’s expensive to step into ourselves, and easier to slip away, so what we do is leave our ashes behind and move forward drinking panaceas from old canteens. The forest is both spongy and flannel. Better to pet the scorpion than herald the dirt.

I don’t really like those big bloated heavy metal songs. But I do like Gothic chocolate. I like the vertebral breath of sumptuous beings and the chins of beautiful conversations. I have furnished this sentence with words. They will seek the meaning I’m trying to capture while I drink my coffee with a jeweled fork and wonder why it takes so long to arrive at transcendence, a little town to the south of wishbone.

I’ve been thinking about dead people a lot lately. Not sure why. Probably because so many people have died lately. Where’d they go? The eternal question. With an eternal answer. Whatever that answer happens to be. I like sugar and silence. Will there be sugar and silence in oblivion? There will be silence. I’m not so sure about sugar. Sugar is never sure. There is no sureness in sugar. Sugar is sugar and salt is salt. There is certainty in pepper but there is neither quartz or calcite in calculus. What do ghosts eat? Ghosts eat ectoplasmic hamburgers. Next to the ghosts of the quadrupeds who provided the meat for the hamburger. But were unwilling participants. And so are now ghosts on the prairie of heaven. Forever. Chewing & ruminating.

Twist a snowman stick. It will correct you. It will quench you. It will cheer you. It will unzip you, your lush suck shaking with ecstasy. Dear World Beauty: you have such fine evening teeth. I offer you this granulated ear screen I found at Home Depot in the fantasy aisle. It protects you from illocutionary faux pas.

I slide through glory looking for the balm of grammar, the hungry mixed kind, submersible and sumac. Start the sugar. I want to rummage a think until it talks like thought. There’s a hot gallant wax for molding such things, the contour of thought, which is shapeless as it is residual, going places I can’t go, saying things I can’t say, filling the air with jewelry, jazz and illumination. Bramble on the borders. Sopranos in the halls. Candles in the corners. Shadows on the walls.

Gently The Worm Runs

Lung weariness dwells in knock knock pay. Gently the worm runs. It exceeds the emotional pillow. The sneaker leg drink walks on Gothic yellow soap. And what this does is dazzling, a northern flu of unbalanced cans.

Yes. The world is falling apart.

Maestro mashes the toot. This is how the true ranges the kinship of countenance. Look into those eyes and see how the magnet of guilt draws verbosity.

Rock crime by a chameleon patella. Sound is a poetry rag. I’m undecided trimming sugar. Hornet storm around the lampshade. Stones engulfed by a swimming pool.

Give me liberty or give me a bean. I will wish for a stalk of black-eyed peas. I crumple away by election. The pomegranate melee made sweating a priority, and we did, we sweated until the stationary arrived and calm prevailed in the greenhouse. The day organ used a rechargeable harness, so we could hop around on a single syllable. And then a chasm of mimosa music reached our ears by nominative fingers, and we could see the carpenter holding his knife.

Have a drink of molecular dwarf quintessence. Sultry letters were scratched on the sumptuous package.  They meant nothing but fire. I’m a career clock when the day closes. My night shirts produce sparks. I’m the rugged fly king. I drink a map of Norway in a storm of camel fat. That’s a nice bronze move you made. Can I have it? I’ll give you anything. Except my harpsichord. I’ll take a sullen misty shot at your salt and see what you think about gladiolas. We all need good moist dirt. And a poem made of quilted falcon offers.

America was wrong about ethanol. And so we went our way. Music hangs by a string. It made me effulgent and convoluted but I acquired a knot to sell. The truest music arrives in a red cloud of lightning and torment and shoots pellets of drunken thought at the night for fun. The night falls dead on a bed of blue air and rises with the dawn, a headache, a yawn, and yesterday’s clothes. Resurrected. And humped like a revision.

Dirty cave cry. Pineapple become bliss. Burning stomach plumbing. Stunned subtle ash. Thoughtless sinking knowledge. These are the moments in life’s drama when one dares a neon swan to jump into a swarm of language and discover a Danish hotel. Whispers of absence. Land twinkling with consciousness. A drawer full of lungs. And the frail grace of a gallant almond.

Eschatological Llama

Think of language as a hyperobject, this thing, this energy that moves through us, creating our moods and thoughts, putting us all in a trance of eschatological llama, a people of mountains and sun, the sweat of rocks, the frost of duty, the glaze of negation, the blaze of affirmation. Machu Pichu. Old Mountain. Language is contradictions. Because they’re unzipped on a plate of opera. Quest along a coast moving through space creating nostrils. A little popcorn goes a long way. Even if our experience of actual conversations, of dialogue in Pinter’s plays, and of the dead metaphors that talk of argument in terms of war, doesn’t tally with our dalliance in monarchy, the luxuries of power, questions raised during squabbles, quirks of behavior, and everything else too nebulous to articulate, too thick to think, too pale to say. It’s all more than mere sensation. Because as soon as a language gets hold of it it no longer belongs to us. It belongs to simulation. And skillets and railroads and lacrosse. Dragons belching fire. Grosbeak in a ponderosa pine. There is this to say about grooves. They once gave us voices and music. Now they give us graves. Grave are the grooves that gravity grooms with her gravel. Everything has its tag and temper. Everything dipped in language has an ulterior spirit, an energy that can’t be captured in German or French, Urdu or Zulu. This is understandable. This is a violent world. There have to be things – beings, spirits, auras, halos, paracletes, parakeets, divine messengers, treasures not of this world. But why say “have to be.” Does anything have to be? This is language asserting itself again. Language insists it has dimensions available to us if we’re willing to be inventive enough. The most inventive writer soon finds a gimmick and finds it fun and worthwhile to expand on its antinomian generosity. The truth appears clear and cold as glass on a barrel of rain and then one day a knock comes to the door and she must answer a summons. And that call is nothing anyone ever predicts. Call it the call of the wild. Call it illocutionary. But Jesus. Get up & open the door.

 

Let's Talk About Bones

Let’s talk about bones and ghosts and psychopaths. Slurred words of hysterical henna. I feel incessant as a revulsion. The humidity has blurred my glasses. But not my thinking. That’s still walking out there to squeeze something, an idea or a sunflower awakening the sun. Bed always feels wonderful. The molasses one day wanted to be a stone and so moved very slow. I see a fierce blaze in your eyes as you read this. Blood walks around in a bag of skin insisting on incense and I say go, tell it on the nails and gape at the ruins of humanity. The first thing I remember was a colossal flash. And I saw a flea follow its destiny. So go, go slowly in a hurry. Go damp and humble as a kitchen rag. Contour is the art of shape. I’ve just escaped from a bikini colony. Last night I dreamed of farms and roadside attractions and went into a bar to have some fun and marveled at my fingers and how handy they were especially when opposed by a thumb. I like the ferocity of mint. This city is rotten to the core. Whose idea of Peru is emotional as an underworld? Whenever I see a box open I run for cover. Hope was the one demon that didn’t make it out of Pandora’s box. This is why to this day apples dwell in trees and when a mouth pushes a sentence out it hurts the proverb, the one about marks on the wall and the ocean of longing chained to my heart. All our hearts. The overall situation is oval. It won’t hurt to sip what can be gulped or to gulp what can be sipped. The snow is falling on a man with a weak pulse. And just yesterday it was raining knives and machinery. How do you insinuate a protest? You remind me of a map. Crows lift themselves into flight and I got a job chewing Ritz crackers. I’m glad to meet you please please me and surrender to the gasoline of yourself. Convulse like chaos. There you go. It’s hard to get to know people in a dance club. I’m taking myself outside if it's visceral enough. I see a vividness I’ve never seen before trickling through the subtext. The sails are filing with wind and the words are filling with meaning and the beards are held together by copper wire. I’ve got an appetite for space. Dignity is a social invention, like strangers on a train, or time enclosed in a book on a plane for banished lovers. We must evacuate this gauze one day and go for a length of tinfoil. I serve a sanguine purpose. My arm clangs like an alarm clock. My engine starts and I let it idle. It’s a process. I’m as perplexed as you with human consciousness. My chest is full of infinity. Ever feel like that? Like rain in California. Welts all over the prophecy. To befriend is to be friendly. Shirring means to gather. Blisters mean nothing they can’t concede to the whisper of cypress in the bayou, or the gater dreaming meat.

I Slap The Air

I slap the air for the love of Mike who’s Mike I don’t know I just live here. He who stands drenched in corruption must also be susceptible to certain types of medication. Me, I’m out on the range. All I care about is geology. Could you hand me that rock? The next sound you hear will be one of abandon. This is how a poem begins. It corresponds to the ocean. And then gets on my glasses. I feel like a rudder in a stew of cinnamon and freeze-dried ideas. This is that greeting whose content baffles the embrace of its prose. A song, on the other hand, begins with a breath. And is carried by melody to a place of healing. For the tongue is a mighty organ. I like to stand in the sunlight and throw myself into it. And when I’m shattering world records I like to talk to the grass. Each blade has something to say on Hustle-Bustle Avenue. I went outside with a big voice and came back with a bank. We think we are forests. But we are sleeves. I’m in expectation of a stick to help fulfill the goal of this costume. One day I will venerate a horse and wear a hat of mice riding bicycles. But this is not about thrashing around in bed. This is about a coup d’état that happened one day on my coffee table. And if you’re out on the highway keep an eye out for black ice. The fog does nothing to help. Not even symbolically. I feel many tired feelings leaning against my rib. And here I am scraping a soup ladle in Sligo. It’s at the heart of my operation. As you can see, I’m wearing a white tie over a black shirt. It would take years to sleep enough to forget this world. I’ve got sleet and ice in my eyebrows. Believe me. I’m not the sort of person who twinkles. I’m the guy who broods alone in a booth with a pint of Guinness in front of him. You, me, all of us, our brains are stuck to a big idea. I once saw a tulip emerge from an opened mouth and lie down on a sheet of sobbing tears of horticulture. All hands on deck. A philosophy just arrived. Defeat is sometimes sweet. But what can be sweeter than serapes and bells? The needles of stern catharsis all ask the same question: what is greed exactly? Then they curl into answers. And a mule named Bill. Here we are. At last. Sewing the air together with words. But are you required to jerk forward like that? We have all stopped at one time or another to measure a gargoyle fart. The next time I see you I will be king. But king of what? Our play is over. The curtain is coming down. You should tell your story to someone backstage. My radio has magical dials. New cars are overly complex, but the lips can still hammer on a sentence now and then and even though the nails are bent and crooked we have ears like gearshifts and nets for catching drugstores. I’m as awed as I am surprised. My leg stiffens just thinking about it. How sadness has killed the novelty of itself but remains an important source of fire. Nobody ever decides to be inspired they just are. I’m resigned to the facts of life. Think of me as a single fish in a bowl of house with a junkyard out back and a calliope in my mouth. I’ve got an umbrella for the underworld and a pearly contraption for milking the sky. Go ahead. Walk in and sit down. The barley is for Charlie and the Harley is for Snarly. Have a chip. Our riots are about to begin.  

 

Roots In A Curlicue

In what sense are the contradictory desires that seize me also mine? It’s weird, you know, when those feelings happen. Feelings that don’t feel like they belong to you. But in what sense did any feeling belong to me? Isn’t it just energy passing through me? The same energy that travels through you. And you. And you. And you. The intellect is what is most universal in us, it is this part of the divine which is identical in everyone. Reflecting on the soul basically amounts to reflecting on what I am by doing without the notion of subject, without something that brings me back to an introspective subjectivity whose canonical formulation we find in Descartes, over there, sitting on a barstool, listening to Patsy Cline. What interested the ancient Greeks regarding the matter of personal identity had much more to do with oversoul than the identity of any one person. Here’s what Plato has to say about this in Timaeus:

And as regards the most lordly kind of our soul, we must conceive of it in this wise: we declare that God has given to each of us, as his daemon [an attendant power or spirit] that kind of soul which is housed in the top of our body and which raises us—seeing that we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant up from earth towards our kindred in the heaven. And herein we speak most truly; for it is by suspending our head and root from that region whence the substance of our soul first came that the Divine Power keeps upright our whole body.

So: we’re plants, and we’re upside down, our roots pointing toward the sky, for divine nourishment. It could be a painting by Magritte.

Why do we write? This is the question that occupies the end of the Phaedrus. One reason is to amuse ourselves, to divert, to rejoice, to console. But what Socrates is getting at in this dialogue is that writing represents dead knowledge. Writing encapsulates a body of knowledge that isn’t inhabited or internalized, it’s frozen, nailed down, stationary. But there’s a way around this: if the writing reproduces the movement of thought, as it might occur in conversation between two people who aren’t in agreement but searching, feeling their way through the incertitude that surrounds us, then the writing is ad-lib, impromptu, without restraint, noises and conversation at a truck stop, abrupt deviations, U turns, nirvana, midnight revels, glass breaking in a street, murmuration of starlings in undulations over a field of alfalfa, pyrotechnic blooms of fireworks in a summer sky. It’s why Kerouac’s writing & Cassady’s Joan Anderson letter make such compelling reading. I like the slop & solecisms of their mercurial dromomania. Bombardments & spouts of nutball jibber jabber fueled by the insanity the absurdity the crazy persistence of life.  

The Indomitability Of Fragility

Life, because it’s weaker than the matter it works into guns and swords, into ships and bridges and Wall Street transactions, symbols of war, symbols of peace, lecture halls and great postulations on the nature of the universe, insinuates itself, trickles in a silver line down a wall of granite and diffuses into the warm blood of a mammal or mingles with the proteins and lipids of an egg, grows into a grizzly or human or albatross. It’s an inexorable and uncompromising weakness that finds its apotheosis in the muscle of the ox and elephant, in the fierce eye of a warrior, the paintbrush in the hand of a madman working out bizarre choreographies on the wall of a building, sentiments to erode the greatest of oppressions, the divine graffiti of delirium. It takes the inertness of matter and kicks it into gear. It’s a nihilistic impulse that accompanies the exhaustion of faith and derives impetus from the negation of illusion and affirmation of form. The world has been corrupted by belief. Faith is reduced to opinion. This is why people are vulnerable to believing anything. The hypermarket of beliefs feeds on rampant, free-floating anxieties. The weakness of believing perverts the art of doubting. The more we deny our fragility by wanting to protect ourselves the more we lose the true exhilaration of being alive.

The Idea Of Other Possible Worlds

I’ve made a lot of dumb choices, done a lot of dumb things. But I’ve always felt that there’s another world in a parallel universe where I made better choices and did smarter things. I’m not going to say I’m fully invested in such an idea. I’m not. But I find it weirdly comforting.  Multiverses represent all metaphysical possibilities. It’s a paradise for all the sad, modal statements I make: “if only I had done this or that,” “I should’ve done that, gone there, not said that,” and so on. It’s got the flavor of fantasy about it, and remorse, and regret, and impotent wistful wishing, but if these imagined alternate worlds are actual, then there’s a plate at the table of an alternate world for me with a heaping mound of mashed potatoes & a chicken cordon bleu dripping with Dijon cream sauce. But would the food in an alternate world be the same food as this world? And what evidence do I have that multiverses are a real possibility? I don’t. I’m not a physicist. Not in this world. I’m a physicist in that other world. I’m doing equations. And in one of these equations I discover a world in which mashed potatoes and chicken cordon bleu exist. It’s the same world as this world but in that world I work at CERN and I can afford a big house and healthcare and plenty of places to put my books. And people behave more responsibly and less savagely so that the climate remains stable and rain cycles are robust and the air is sweet. In other words, it’s the same world as this world, but different. The differences are subtle but they have large consequences. It’s a better place. I have no reason to assume that it’s better, it’s just better. I can feel it. But how do I get to that world? I might be just a breath away. Is the air a membrane? Are there invisible doors we can open? Yes. They’re called words. Words are the very coinage of possibility. The currency of conjecture. That’s what makes them so delightful, so devious, so mercurial, so potent, so delicate, and so indestructible. Each word a world. Each world a word. I write them down and for a while I’m elsewhere. I’m here but elsewhere. And were it not for memory, & staring in a rearview mirror, I’d avoid collision. I’d pull to the side of the road and smell the air. And find that other world in my left pocket, with some loose change.

 

Hemopoiesis

It may be an oversimplification to say that our likes and dislikes define who we are. Likes and dislikes are discernments, not nutrients. Though I do like peanut butter. And strawberry jam. Put that on bread and you’ve got matter for tribute and conversation. A dialectic of food that could easily evolve into performance, symbolization and sneezing. Why not get the peripheral nervous system involved? I’m sympathetic to homeostasis. I think of it as a melody in muscle fiber, epinephrin dancing in the bloodstream. And lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about bones. They’re more than a framework to hang one’s flesh on, more than mere levers for the enabling of movement. They have connective tissue, cartilage, which requires sustenance, the diffusion of nutrients, omelets and oxygen. The bones themselves consist of calcium and phosphorous. Twain’s story of seeing the glow of buffalo bones in the Rockies comes to mind. Phosphorescence of radio dials late at night. Luminescent comb jellies. Protoplasm, ectoplasm, metaplasm, cataplasm. Gels, cells, and bicycle bells. Knobs, blobs, and globs of gaub. Bone cells are connected with each other by canaliculi, little canals that also connect with tiny blood vessels. It’s all quite dizzying. There’s so much intricacy, lacunae and lamellae, concentric layers of the intercellular matrix. To say nothing of the engineering, the ways the bones connect and move and allow me to stand up and walk and gaze at the sky. Toe bone connected to the foot bone foot bone connected to the heel bone heel bone connected to the leg bone. And bones make blood. It’s called hemopoiesis. I find that astonishing. I had no idea. And stress. Stress is necessary for the integrity of bone. It’s why astronauts have to work out in space. Do treadmills in harnesses and belts or droop forever like jellyfish on earth. Funny, the embodiments of bone, druids and drummers and potbellied rogues named Falstaff. When I think about the processes that keep me alive, that brought me into this life to begin with, and will one day expire, bones to dust, and how I have virtually no control over any of it, it happens despite whatever I may be thinking at any given time, consciousness goes about its business, feeling itself free, unattached, and which may be expressed in the quick maneuvers of a violinist, the friction of a bow making vibrations, the sounds that hang on the bone of any given moment, the catgut making Bach talk.

 

Poof

I love listening to Rachel Podger. I love having the pure sounds of a violin going on in my head, the brightness of Bach making my brain glow with sublime sillinesses, solecisms and nurturing ounces of turquoise embedded in lovelorn sound, wistful melodies palpable as rope, the hemp of reverie, glistening radiances of sound in sanctioned sawhorse territory. By that I mean wood. The smell of it. The look of it. The grain of it. The shine of it lacquered in a Venetian studio.  Cows grazing on the slopes of the Dolomites. And then there’s Lucinda Williams singing “Magnolia,” a song by J.J. Cale. My God it’s beautiful. It sounds and feels as authentic as old wood. Sunset breeze over the buffalo hills of eastern Montana. Melancholy as the whippoorwill. I get completely lost in this song. It puts Putin and his army in the Ukraine out of my mind long enough to get a bearing on what’s real and what’s left for the senses in this senseless world. O world please don’t blow up today. I keep seeing that flash. Then poof! I’m gone. Without knowing I’m gone. Everything gone. You gone. Me gone. We gone. That’s how I imagine it. The big one. The big explosion. Planet Earth blasted into rockdom. Icy and forbidding as Pluto. And why? Is it worth it trying to find cause and effect around here? Very little in human experience has been logical. Though given a chance, I can rationalize almost anything. Almost. The rest is silence. Hamlet carried offstage. Ophelia drowning in her fairytale gown. Rimbaud in a caravan crossing the Ethiopian desert. It always comes down to that. Barrenness. Bags of ivory & coffee. The riches of the world exchanged in crowded souks. Voices of old women. Sleep of old men. Kids gazing into wells. The world spun in protozoan glee. Ended with a grimace. And a blink.