My One Objective

I have but one objective, which is to succeed at anticipating what will happen when I take my shirt off. Yesterday, I saw Bob Dylan and John Lennon in a limousine, drunk. I took my shirt off and got very little reaction. A chuckle from Bob, a sneer from John. People see different things when I remove my shirt. For some, it’s a chorus of puppets on the lipstick horizon near Tahiti. They’re probably referring to my tattoo. But it’s a tattoo of a steam shovel in the grip of a strong emotion. Human perception is such a strange phenomenon. Performance artist Laurie Anderson saw lewd gonads in a pod of abstraction. Can you hear them? The bells outside are loud and jangly and full of trying. Trying to reach the ears of God. Trying to heal the world with the redemption of sound, vibrations from a bowl of metal swinging back and forth while a maniacal hunchback jumps from bell to bell, madly in love with life, with love, with the rivers of blood circulating in his body. I think I’ll pause now and have a sandwich. The universe is an organ donor. I want to be in good shape so that I may share my organs with the universe as the universe shares its organs with us. And this is why my one objective throughout life has been to remove my shirt. Language is the phantom limb of a lost cognition. Each button is a word, each word a button. And here I stand, a torso rising like a dark wall of art, snug in the realm of the nominal.