If You Press This

If you press this, it will harden the massive napkin my escape accepts. Here I am enjoying a gut lunch in my rolled-up canoe. My suite is intended to agitate our jaws for conversation. I’ve got a wheel of fruit named Tubby, but it needs a biography. If we solicit the gods and buffer time with a little hedonism, things will belch. There will be great relief, and songs to sing, and supplies to replenish. The light suspends my nuts, and the wonder of it prompts the reading to do what a neck does, and speak Navajo. After the bald treasure of evening ripped my clothes off, I saw a water pump in the distance, and my lips, if so urged, would think they had followed my gaze. There are subtleties whose knots can lay bare next to my thought. If any of this makes sense to you, there's an echo I can eat, but I need coordinates. Suppose I object to the pipe. Or the ceiling in the Vatican. Will you come and help me understand things a little better? Everything confuses me. My wrinkles play with my face, and a god percolates in my rug. Realizations come in spurts of emotive delectation, and I felt suddenly quite sure about the Kuiper belt, and the shape of the gravitational wave I was attempting to surf. I don’t understand everything about poker, but I do know that a wormhole works by contortion. Here is an example: a man sewing space with a long rope and the tooth of a shark. It was the day the Everly Brothers came to town, and everything felt creamy and reciprocal. The whispers wiggled in the rhododendron until the bus arrived and my clairvoyance got personal. I’d just returned from Mars and was slapping the dust from the silver of my spacesuit when the skein of everything rational came unraveled and moonlight spilled on the pleasantries. I overheard someone say that the subordination of autonomous artworks to the element of social function buried within each work and from which art originated in the course of a protracted struggle, wounds art at its most vulnerable point. This made me sad. But alert. It was surely not going to happen to me. This sentence is a bullet. If I want to get rich, there are ways to do that. Art is different. It needs bones and pedals. Mimetic heartburn. The geometry of nothing. The sounds of the head raining down on a sheet of paper. If I want to show a feeling, I take it out of my mouth and hang it in the air. Dead Sea mud settles to the bottom of the paragraph. And this is how the mind joins the quiet life of the refrigerator.