Letters Are Skeletons

I made a map in the sand of the island of my dreams. It hovered at the edge of absence. And smoked and trembled and quaked until it was swept away. Just like Ricky Nelson singing “Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye Heart.” I’m floating an armchair into my mind so that I can readjust to the gravity of the situation. When you get to be my age you spend so much time in the past that the present seems like glass & the future is 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock. There was a time I slid down the hall in my socks crying out for the gods. Now everything is echoes. And feathers and mollusks and splatter and rhubarb. Wi-Fi bombast blood and bombs. Androids drones and homelessness. Wall Street corruption and sycophantic swordfish dinners. It used to be candles & wine. Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to that? I’ve got mosquitoes on my terrycloth sneakers. I’ve got a black magic helmet and a suitcase packed with voodoo. I’m ready to go. 

I’m immersed in pink noise. Ten hours of it, to be exact. It’s a sound therapy program for people who suffer tinnitus to get a little relief, available on YouTube. The sound masks the ringing in one’s head. It sounds like being on a passenger jet. I’m lying on a bed but it feels as if I could lean over and see clouds beneath. I find myself getting a little euphoric. The noise provides a perspective from which I can think about my experience of tinnitus more objectively. I think of the sound of background radiation and how it helped astrophysicists form their Big Bang theory. Background radiation has a pulsing buzzing sound that morphs into a monotonous sputter. It appears the entire universe has tinnitus. But in this instance the tinnitus is a pink noise that drowns my tinnitus in an ocean of sound. Why bother to travel anywhere to go look at a waterfall if you couldn’t hear the thunder of it? Tinnitus is the sound that accompanies consciousness in the same way the sound of a waterfall is the sound of its volume affirming itself in space.

You can only bend reality so far. And it takes a lot of words to do it. Though the fewer words you use the more effectively does reality bend to your will. Not knowing what reality is to begin with is a big help. Visits to the junkyard in search of a carburetor opened an avenue of thought and discovery I hadn’t anticipated. Cars don’t use carburetors anymore, they use fuel injectors, and it’s a downright shame. Carburetors are less expensive and have jets that push the gas into the combustion chambers. Fuel injection requires a lot of fiddling because of electrical components and return lines to the fuel tank, and only delivers about 10 horsepower at peak. This is a reality I’d like to bend into a CT4 Cadillac with a 2.7L Turbocharged engine, premium alloy wheels, HD color touch-display and heated seats with lumbar massage. Or I could just buy it. If I had money. Which I don’t. I could steal it. But I’m too old for jail. Like I say. You can only bend reality so far. Bend it too hard and it’ll break. You’ll find yourself standing on the shoulder of some highway, thumb out, your hair blowing in the wind as a fragment of reality speeds by.

The theater is the best place to demonstrate percussion. These are my slow night theories. I'm fresh from the soul cave. When I do my fast night theories I wear a thousand scarves and a homesick sponge. Can a dry poplar stray far from the sleet on a windy night? Not at all. The poplar needs the sleet as much as the sleet needs the poplar. Distance may be achieved in other ways. Trains, planes, and electrolytes. Needs are often served in the guise of hazard. A punch to the gut, a brawl in the alley, a perforated peptic ulcer. It’s all part of life. I find comfort in philosophy. It makes me feel cadenced and gyroscopic, like a foghorn, & gives me enough words to make a paragraph feel comfortable. Then why am I anticipating a visit from my temper? I’ve got water, food, a wife and a warm room, a slithering inkling of better possibilities awaiting us all at the gates of sequence, and a helicopter that is so perfectly derelict in explanation I weep. Some nights I just don’t feel like using capital letters for anything. And that’s ok. What irks me are leaky pipes. This winter has been particularly bad. But enough about me. What about you? What are you wearing? Am I some sort of pervert? Quite frankly, yes. But a really good one. I mean, who writes poetry in the Age of Wi-Fi? Techies rule the world, not poets. If poets ruled the world we’d have libraries everywhere and traffic lights using haikus instead of color signals. Jack Spicer would’ve survived the Beatles. Lou Welch would’ve survived the seventies. Emily Dickinson would’ve lived to be 108. And Adrian Rich would’ve been much much richer. Don’t you give up, baby, don’t you cry, don’t you give up till I reach the other side. Dick and Dee Dee. 1961. My first concert. And then I became Fredrich Nietzsche & grew a pet mustache to keep me warm and inquisitive on cold lonely nights at the edge of the known universe. Which was the parking lot at Dicks. And sometimes the wharfs in downtown Seattle smelling of sea slop and mollusks. And sometimes a bookstore open at midnight, fragrant with thought and fabrication.

Letters are skeletons. The flesh is in the imagination. If I try to slip an actual chicken into the word for chicken, there are difficulties. Needles awaken in my skin and I sprout feathers. I become a chicken. I peck and scratch at the ground. I lay an egg. I incubate an egg. The egg hatches & another language emerges. And it becomes a chicken. Soon the world is overrun with chickens, like in Kauai, which is teeming with wild chickens. This is the story of language. According to the International Society for the Understanding and Proper Feeding of Chickens. One day a chicken laid an egg and out of that egg a universe emerged, dressed in lottery tickets and pyramids, and began making sounds that mirrored the world in ways that made it appear distorted, and cotton, and imbued with aspirations toward truth and understanding. This was the world’s first chicken. But if this was the world’s first chicken, where did the egg come from? How did the egg precede the chicken? It was probably caused by heating an allegory, which caused a flame of semantic yolk to flicker within the heart of an ovoid, and become an omelet.