Letter From The Matrix

Sometimes I like to imagine myself high on Benzedrine and whiskey sitting in front of a manual typewriter like Jack Kerouac or Anthony Burgess and the thought of this makes me high whatever it means to be high I’m not sure how to define what it is to be high and this makes me high high in vitamins high in emotional altitude I believe it’s a form of well-being as well as what the French call dépaysement being out of one’s familiar realm and somewhere foreign somewhere a tad unfamiliar and this is stimulating

R is in the kitchen making me a cherry pie it’s my birthday I’m 75 a formidable age I should buy a wig and have it powdered with pixie dust and wear a knee-length coat with gorgeous embroidery expensive lace in jabots and cuffs and Rococo buttons of German silver with rounded edges and delicate engravings

Because it is how I feel anachronistic and ill-adapted to the sanctions of the zeitgeist

I prefer the din of words to the explosions of bombs though I must say when words react chemically to one another and explode it’s marvelous

I see a wind sweep its broom over the surface of the sound rippling in melees of foam as the chest of a man drools from a notebook and a flood of turbulent thought inundates our carpentry

When I say carpentry I mean wood and nails a design pieces conjoined measured assembled dovetailed kissed and hammered I mean anything with a solid form anything structural anything with glue anything with horses standing in it or cows with hanging udders and soft woeful looks in their eyes for they need milking the great relief of milk released and squirted into buckets and this is what we call the architecture of farming and it smells of straw and burlap and manure and the bellowing of bullfrogs

Trip to the grocery store for bottled water and eggs was a tad dystopic you have to park underground it’s dark and smelly then ascend a steep flight of stairs the store used to be so inviting everything glittered all the products looked tantalizing as armchairs shiny democratic and proud now everything looks sad desultory and barren and a lot of the shelves have gaping holes where the products used to be and are no more due to so-called supply chain problems only one checker left the rest is self-serve people slavishly checking their own groceries nobody smiling nobody talking just robotically checking their groceries and if like me you comment angrily on the docility and stupidity of the public the security guard puts you in his angry worried focus hello agent smith

People often ask me what should I do and I say you should do what excites you this isn’t true I never say this nobody asks me what should I do but it’s true you should do what excites you and if the medicine is a hit you should thank science not poetry poetry is a different kind of pharmaceutical it never finishes what it starts it’s always on fire always bristling with syllables big fat vowels that spin like wild grouse out of the mouth and explode into tepees all the roads are exuberant and muddy all the fields open to the horizon