What I'm Trying To Do

Though it may not be immediately apparent, these words have been carefully arranged on the shore of this sentence and are waiting for someone to pull them into their mind and set them afloat. This will have the effect of lightning in the sky, the one over there smiling and winking over the top of a mountain, and ruffling the world like a French impressionist. This will trigger a disorientation in some people, and epiphanies in others. Not that they’re mutually exclusive. Not in this frame of mind, however crooked it may seem to hang on the wall. The sunset looks funny. And now you know why. Next time I see you reading this paragraph, I’m going to follow you home like a dog. I’ll show you some magic tricks. Please don’t be upset. It'll be fun. But if you see me opening doors where there are no doors, it means that I will have connected with something larger than a magic trick. It will mean I’m here, hanging from the edge of your eyelid.

Riding the elevator of the Grand Hotel, Proust notices an open window of frosted glass that’s normally closed, and enjoys a view of the countryside from a novel perspective. This is like reading a difficult sentence repeatedly until it suddenly opens and you see at last what it’s been opaquely concealing. One day it’s a school of dolphins keeping pace with my understanding of intuition, and on another I might see an old man walking on the side of the road. Have you ever felt something urgent stirring in your caviar? It was probably this indistinct thought finding its way to the center of what I mean, which is glowing in the distance. I keep driving in that direction, but I never get there. And that’s what keeps me going, word by word, page by page.

What I’m trying to do is build an emotion I can live with, and talk about later. I like it when a guitar sounds like a wounded animal. But I can’t do that. Does money still exist? I can always start a podcast. Usually, if I want to show a feeling I take it out of my mouth and hang it in the air. But this often backfires. As soon as you dress an emotion in words it becomes a crisis. Shape manipulating the meaning of itself. You could say it’s all a semantic game in the end. One thing I’m sure of, I don’t want a gadget on my head. I crave the wilderness. The sparkle of irrational beauty. Be it nothing more than a migration of words moving toward a gleeful delinquency. 

I sometimes wonder if there are parts of the universe that are innately unknowable to us. Artists struggle to extend our perceptions through heaving tongues of steel and vibrating fictions. There is a marbling in the mind, intermixtures of ooze and dock. And the way the waves move and the tides come and go and the universe continues its squawking of background radiation. I love this chair and its framework. But this time it’s different. A universe just fell out of my head. It rolled out the door and down the street. I apologize to the driver of a Tesla and bring it back. I carry it with my mind. I’m spilling it in words. The driver of the Tesla is calling her lawyer. It’s an imperfect universe. It’s not as perfect as a Tesla. Which is from another dimension entirely.

There are taut veins under the ochre. It accentuates the belt that old man is wearing. As you can see, it’s ringed with skulls. It’s me. Before I existed. I walked into life on a bet. It was a one-horse town. But I get by. I embody my own cruel tendencies. This is my arm. It matches the other one, which is just now reaching for a bow. The incentive of the violin isn’t music, the incentive of the violin is arbitrary and slippery, like the spirits that reside in mushrooms. This is how languages evolve. The sky trickles down singing while the sorcerers chew it into dream. You can’t take anything for granted. Colors surge. Shapes of air die softly and fall away. Their residue is called reverie. The kerosene of emotion blazes at the darkness and the night steps softly across the universe, dripping stars. We shiver in the cold and get ready for a new reality.