Like A Rolling Stone 59 Years Later

 

Cold today we passed someone curled up against the side of the QFC on Mercer under two black umbrellas I’m still not used to seeing people in tents around the city it still shocks four years ago a young woman froze in a tent in February in a small park a few feet away from homes worth millions

9:21 p.m. the bathroom light goes on I’m on the bed in the bedroom with a laptop on my lap tonight’s trending searches on Google zombie deer disease rogue wave norwegian cruise ship gs pay scales covid 18 coronavirus houthi rebels red sea alex batty missing

59 years later Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone still excites it’s weird the song has such a triumphant sound but it’s referring to tragic circumstances back then homelessness had a very odd chic attached to it young people from good homes joyfully throwing themselves into vagabondage it was a little insane but everyone also knew deep down they had places to go if the road got too tedious or frightening or weird Like A Rolling Stone served as a very robust and peculiar anthem for that level of heedlessness but if you get past the music and listen closely to the words something very different is occurring to the protagonist of the song nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street and now you're gonna have to get used to it that’s fucking scary because everyone gets a close look at it now on their way to work or the grocery store and it’s not pretty and it’s certainly not chic

Susan Sontag on Antonin Artaud whenever behavior becomes sufficiently individual it will become objectively anti-social and will seem to other people mad all human societies agree on this point they differ only on how the standard of madness is applied and on who are protected or partly exempted for reasons of economic social sexual or cultural privilege from the penalty of imprisonment meted out to those whose basic anti-social act consists in not making sense

We live in two parallel worlds now the luxurious privileges of the elites and the dog-eat-dog brutalities of the working class or what’s left of it

Poetry has returned to the universities the only place where it continues to receive high status and serious attention but the bebop spontaneities of the jackhammer streets have been elided by the elliptical refinements of a language groomed with symposiums and discourse

The aristocrats of academia ain’t got nothin’ on me I live in a conch shell at the bottom of the sea smoking opium on a red velvet couch and watching reruns of Taxi one day I hope to shake off all ambition all pretense and pomp and rise to the surface long enough to take a course in Taylor Swift at Harvard

7:27 p.m. Christmas Eve I drift off asleep in my chair reading Proust with my new suspenders we had roast beef cooked in a slow-cooker all day mashed potatoes and gravy and watched the final episode of Tulsa King starring a 76 year old Sylvester Stallone a show in which reality is stretched so thin that whatever occasional bits of concreteness behind the silliness and outrageous contradictions of the plot appear seem almost borrowed from an actual Tulsa the city Ron Padgett Joe Brainard and Ted Berrigan once called home a hand on a steering wheel entanglements of fear and loyalty now and then some really good dialogue pissing contests among Mafia capos cowboy ex-cons motorcycle gang led by a crazy Irish psychopath bullets breaking bottles in a bar not your average Christmas movie but it filled the eyes and ears with moving images while we filled our mouths with luscious morsels of beef marinated in time and balsamic vinegar 

Arable Parables

 

There was a pageant of salmon at the McFadden Hotel Matisse showed us that there’s greatness in struggle I feel Matisse in my feet I go around hungry for the fulfillment of inexplicable desires I enjoy the immodesty of rain and the hilarity of snow I feel incidental to a soulful drama like that scene where King Kong is blinded and enraged by paparazzi and breaks free of his chains on the New York stage and goes on a wild spree scaling buildings and flirting with women is this really a good time to talk about refining the senses the way that a reader’s eyes glean the words and make of them what they will was upsetting to Plato who saw in this a danger inimical to the homogeneous structure of society since words are only substitutes for a reality that is neither actual or present and so may be easily manipulated to create illusory phenomena  

Susan Sontag on Artaud writing is conceived of as unleashing an unpredictable flow of searing energy

I’m guessing flippancy doesn’t go over well in prison I like to engage in sketchy activities fiction assembles a reflection and calls it a forehead poetry being first and foremost a form of wrapper a way of framing and preserving phenomena in phonemic cellophane though it could also be argued poetry is a vehicle for pursuing the collisions and collusions of the intellect moon river moving silently through the night I can hear you screaming to get out music is nothing if not universal it can lift us from our predicaments with the grace of angels and the force of a 200 hp Yamaha

I dwell in hypothesis like a trombone think of this as a cylinder that will push any problem wherever you want that problem to go if I’m being reckless against demand it’s because I’m infrared I can iron steam with mutton and button steam in iron I’m modern as licorice and ancient as yeast the Woke doing polka in a graveyard of dead languages

There was once a forest guide with a cold hard face under the glitter of a postmodernist Stetson who parachuted into the Black Forest and was never seen or heard from again

This is what Lautréamont calls mechanically constructing the brain of a soporific tale heavy duty meringue commitment is a technicolor triangle you’ll find chatter and oboes at the end of your arm have you ever had a bear stare at you screaming is worthless detachment has a latch that can separate colors it is our resistance against lyric intensity this isn’t Theodore Roethke this is a dense fine-grained heteropolyhedral paroxysm of sensory membranes evangelistic earrings and intuitions of infinity draped in supernatural grammar

The raccoons would appear at night and put their tiny hands on the window and stare at me at my desk trying to write like Robert Creeley brutal concisions of emotional rubber interchange is essentially a parody of sunlight I never lost my fascination with Cyndi Lauper there are no indignities attached to singing singing has stochastic properties the horizon is a horizon of words beyond which there are still more words

The book exists so that we may insert ourselves into the body of a monumental object a lot of things seem to be instinctual like that moment when staring at a sheet of paper becomes a slide into a ghostly panorama of backpocket silver and Viennese fountains and the first thing that comes to mind is to bite into the void and tear off a big piece of nihilism

Good readers pollinate bad readers look for content space is what a forehead does in front of a brain consider this lobster for a moment no it is not a real lobster a real lobster would flick its antennae and dance around the sentence like Fred Astaire this lobster has a mind of orchids and remains below the liniment kissing the skin

The bartender had a face like the cover of a sci-fi paperback the myth of its existence circulating the used bookstores from here to Timbuktu exploded my fingernails as they typed away at the giant mode incomprehension employed to pass from judgment to accepting the reality of lacquer and the generous new look of gnosis with tits to match

I can give you a ride to Tulsa I’m heading toward disaster beauty seems so tenuous these days England broods in my writing there are other dimensions of being that elude me what allegory beyond eggnog exhibits bamboo I climbed in through the bathroom window with huge bulging eyes and a sweet melody on my lips what makes Euclid spatial are bananas and gas but go ahead insinuate insects if you must clench your fist in amber leaning forward like a resistance it isn’t scientific to rinse grisaille with punctuation if you can imagine bracken you can imagine bracken breaking into abstractions whose quality of light streams through the rosary window dropping photos of Billy the Kid playing croquet by a schoolhouse

What in this world keeps us from falling apart 30 gallons of gorilla glue and a big rubber band cod is a species of God but so is the eternity dangling at the end of your dock consider the variables castigate the unbearable I remember the night I stood in the bar looking up at a TV in which Ricky Lee Jones was singing and downed a shot of Wild Turkey a few days later the universe fell on my head and I had to get 20 stitches and a clothes iron all I know is that when I got to the end of the street I felt exposed as Picasso painting in his underwear and the sun was coming up and together with the mountains I drew my own conclusions concerning muskrats 

 

 

 

What It Means To Be Bohemian

 

I must learn the art of the broadsword I had everything I needed to make a break for the hills a waterfall splashes the things I put off to the side a man can only do so much ferns always look ancient the growl of a big cat interrupts the soughing of the wind in the pines

I thought about growing a mustache deranged and frenetic like a paragraph of stars after going down the Wenatchee River in early April I rode an appaloosa named Apache in the Pacific surf I learned to juggle in Snohomish there’s not much you can do to save a language from decaying Rimbaud kept pace with the camel on the sandy soil of the Guban desert there at your elbow stands the long cool drink

When you put words together they begin to do things in the mind this tender ache which is all over you like a voluptuous feeling no but seriously what did I achieve during all these years before the troopers who were busy with their horses in the square had finished grooming them you hope for the truth when talking to a mechanic but it’s a very thin and whispery hope the camel is for background as I wait for a vision the exquisite diminuendo of consciousness in good clean linen

It's complicated to find annoyance in a meeting I always like to imagine what people on the other side of the horizon might be doing dousing a candle feeding a cat starting an engine the last time I saw optimism I must’ve been in my early 20s when that happens you go somewhere else and hope for something better cravings associated with deep satisfactions that never follow should teach you something about compression sleeves for ankle support one’s whole sensuous being is immersed in portulaca as night falls here dawn rises on the other side of the equation soap and dizziness and pain are all part of the path to glory

Tools are fun chameleons are a little less fun but amusing in their own way sensations during fever are barely distinguishable from mockery I feel like I’m administering CPR to the English language infinity can’t be comprehended with human intelligence I bang on expandibility much to the annoyance of everyone in old age cynicism is as routine as cataracts and rheumatism spring is a time very far from here

Swimming makes me feel parenthetical I remember those calendars that used to hang in every car repair garage in America a young busty woman in a big straw hat and red bikini at the beach I can smell mud all the way to the roof it was the era of suitcases and whispers neurons are expressed in sparkling eyes words come later if they come at all I tried ordering a hamburger and couldn’t stop laughing at the word hamburger somebody else had to order it for me the world had three and a half billion people in it not to mention swim meets universities rock stars amoebas diseases slides emergencies and prizefights

In the winter of 1966 I traveled east to North Dakota all the men on the train wore thick winter coats and astrakhan hats fifty-eight years later I hear the breath of a woman doing yoga the room grew quiet when Proust entered the room no one expected the supernatural could do such things jump around in a frenzy while Gimme Shelter floods the room with urgency sex drugs and rock ‘n roll one cannot pray insincerely in candlelight things remain close to a window after an earthquake no reason no reason at all for any of this it just happened

Before everything on the planet fell prey to technofeudalism we had opinions we could share in private and now there are piles of towels on the old straw chair and apps and scooters and streaming services the cross is a symbol of hope in Vaticans of dope the feeling of warm ocean air passing over your skin in silken fluency there are no conceptions everything exists life in the foundry was hot and noisy as the language shrinks the minds that feed on its shores shrink with it the sound of a bullet ricocheting off of a rock the almanac is ash this is the language I use for making a skeleton the castle of Lindisfarne comes to mind the Vikings ripped jewels from the books they could not read I remember a puppeteer in downtown Seattle a tall lanky guy he had a Jimi Hendrix marionette that played guitar I don’t see that kind of flexibility in the stars but I do see Being

Denture stomatitis is characterized as inflammation and erythema of the oral mucosal areas the denture covered I put it in a small jar with a lozenge of Efferdent Deadwood is quiet in the morning cowboys sitting around a fire discussing Spinoza I plead with the air to understand the wind as soon as you pushed pass the big revolving door at Macy’s you would be seduced by dozens of fragrances the air passing through itself creating an embassy between two worlds I wish I could demonstrate what it means to be bohemian some people are open to vision others struggle to find kindness no one likes to be morose the one question you don’t want to ask yourself is why am I doing this what’s the point Arthur Rimbaud holds the elevator door open for me as I rush to get in

  

 

 

Tattered Chair

Consciousness is not caused by sugar. Consciousness is caused by a static electric charge. And two pounds of flour. Believe me. I’m just as anxious as you are to get out of here. It’s sad to see a culture die. Keep the windows closed. Being is everywhere. Would you like anything? A glass of water? You’ve come this far. For which I am thankful. This makes all my emotions happy. Palm fronds tremble in the breeze. I like belonging to the parable of an experience. The green heat of a chameleon, for example, has the power to inseminate any situation with the sugary claws of pliancy. Pondering anything, really, makes it less real, makes it richer, makes it teeter and twirl in greenery, makes it uniquely beautiful in ways that elude categorization. Dark conflagrations salt themselves and flee. The world is so different from what it used to be. It used to be earthy and musk and now it’s as cold and excluding as diamonds. I go from door to door selling pendulums. Invisible pendulums. That swing from nowhere to nowhere, emphasizing the futility of it all, and the ironic pragmatism of that, of being fatalistic, and how optimistic it is to think of non-existence, which is how I dressed before I got here, zipped in the immediacy of the moment. Deficiency strains what squirms in the Rembrandt brown, and gives us a feeling of soft black artless locution. Here, open this: an anthology of the light swarming with hungry ganglions. It reminds me of dirt. Gardeners fulminating over a philodendron in Madrid. Affluence is a mixed religion. Some worship gristle, others worship lace. Chaos is not the disaster. Time is the disaster. The language of nerves leads to the well-being of yesterday. The current moment is raw. It's a perfect day for poetry. I’m in a foggy state leaning over an abyss of darkness. It’s something I’ve always been good at doing, though considerably harder to turn a profit with it, or apply for a job in the aeronautics market. I feel the cosmos in my shoulder, a living embassy of bone and cartilage. If you’d like a ride to the end of this sentence, I’m here for you, rummaging around in an agate, looking for wasted time. I know what I’m doing. I used to write articles for the daily cynical. I couldn’t find a single thing to believe in, except holidays. I love holidays. They’re always so rubber. I blow a profligate era of aesthetic dilemma across a sheet of paper so that it’ll pop up in somebody’s eyes one day. It is not a dignified profession. Not like plumbing, or carpentry. But I can sing rhapsodies to the chestnut king, and convulse on the floor like a hammer. Each word is a nail. Each sentence a crane lifting the names of things. The meaning of the clock is purely cosmetic. There’s no time to tell here. Only a tattered chair.

Memorandum Of Understanding

What is unregulated capitalism up to today? Never mind. I’d rather not know. Let’s talk about something else. Last night, the impact of a meteor ignited everything in the city except the harbor. It was extraordinarily beautiful. it sometimes happens that disaster and various other cataclysmic events are quite beautiful. There seem to be a lot of catastrophes lately. Wildfires, wars, gargantuan chunks of ice breaking off of Antarctica, rivers drying up, houses cracking, whales and sharks capsizing pleasure craft. We live in apocryphal times. This is a boon for language, which is always hungry for crises. Anything to break the monotony of sequence. It’s clean below the problem but none of the hats fit. We need new formulas for everything. Tear the van apart from top to bottom: we are my own construction. It began when I was four, and president of the floor. I saw a cake rock back and forth and assumed it had consciousness smeared all over it. It didn’t. It was just frosting. Consciousness is not caused by sugar. Consciousness is caused by a static electric charge. And two pounds of flour. Believe me. I’m just as anxious as you are to get out of here. I know what it’ll take to get us to Hypatia, about 101.2 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. But I don’t know what will be required of us when we arrive. Perhaps nothing. We’ll get around. Pay attention to the local vibe. I have a motor of plywood and this is my zoom. The next time you see me I’ll be across the room. It’s sad to see a culture die. Keep the windows closed. We’re the blossoms it’s incongruous to kiss. Life’s continuous bobble approves the beat of the unprecedented. We move forward. We find time to think. And paint. And talk. And raise philodendrons. I thirst to think is as good as to say try a car next time you feel like a praline. I was raised by a paradigm and lived in a brain. When I arrived at the age of mutual consent I braced for the crash. In the end, all my misperceptions had been perforated. I found wisdom among the amphibians. Or sometimes I’ll imagine I’m in a hotel room. Fresh white towels. Escritoire. Queen-size innerspring mattress. The puddle I left in the bathroom reflects a kinetic sculpture of bicycle wheels, phonemes, trampolines, bus tokens, cloudbursts, coil inductors and homographs wandering around in circles. I believe it was some form of towel rack. Shower curtains have always been a problem for me. As well as faucets, forceps, four-way stops and mezzanines. The wallpaper is pure Dada, and consists of fornicating airport runways imposed on a theme of banjos. It happens that our life beats inside, and when we see such things as devotion, it makes us go sanguine. All else is, by comparison, an ill-fitted window. A torn bag hangs from my elbow. It’s true. I like throwing distortions at the wall. I keep hoping a door will open. And when it does, I’ll open it & enter the journey of words it brings.

The Human Condition

What is the human condition? Four features of our condition: our awareness of our own awareness; human existence precedes its essence; the occasional use of semicolons to make a point and the deep-seated sense of alienation that follows from all this. Here it comes: the Columbia River Gorge. It was there all the time. It just required our assent. Our assent to descend. Our assent to ascend. Our ascent to assent. By which we ascertain multiple layers of rock. And this is another condition: the rate at which the car moves with a bad ignition coil. This will need some looking into. Continual searching is all part of the human experience. The search for lost reading glasses (which one is wearing). The search for a charming melody. The search for oil. The search to get away from oil. Or just plain oil. It’s a diphthong, after all, which is the equivalent of being good at ping pong. Diphthongs are fluid, and towns and clouds and deer. The search for love and understanding. Understanding the search for love. Loving the understanding that comes with sharing a bed. The softness in any alphabet based on a cosmology of linen. It was only real when seen from a distance; up close, it resembled pancakes. If you see a compass swollen with syntax please write to William Wordsworth, Romantic Movement, my head. Area code E = mc². Name one compelling thing that doesn’t require an allegory to go with it. Everything in life gives us something to decipher, be it a coffeehouse or an airport. You ask: what is kinetic energy? It's a drive in the country. It coordinates the private walk we do at night when the moon is full and our glass is empty. We freely grant what our requirements emit. And this is how energy becomes an eager participant in our lives, creating matter when nothing matters, and holes where they do. My taste for flying is coming. I can feel it in my toes. But mostly in my imagination. I have a pact with gravity: don’t bother me when I’m sleeping. It invites a bone which brings forth a simulacrum. When this happens, example sees what we beg from the beyond. Swans glide into thick mist. Alchemy greets the rise of my crisis. Everything feels Victorian, with a touch of ice hockey. I think the word is anachronistic. Or is it pantheistic? You decide. I’m done with decisions. From now it’s all about indecisions. Incisions. And peyote visions. Do you understand what I’m saying? Me neither. It appears, so it would seem, that between the two of us, we’ve aroused a different language, a flow of bark and French ochre. I feel an apotheosis on the way. And a new paradigm. And a new sign. To say nothing of puzzles, which will be worked out with predicates, and dragged across the river, without getting wet.

 

The Vagaries Of Oysters

We run willow to my friendly heckle. Below the ultramarine wheels behind the throat is a laugh. It’s gestating. Attach yourself to a fasten batch before the zipper cracks a slide open. Pigeonhole the pimp pimple. I want to tell you something. Writing is a bundle of imponderable brocade for my fingers to do. Often, while doing automobile explorations, writers choose paragraphs to do the harder sensations. I use contraptions if I need to change the epilogue. Formulas, foreknowledge and fountains. Sensations persuade us to go on tours. As I am I am as a flap of mohair. I will go anywhere. Even Reno. While the candy stings, our touch will be supernatural. Open your eyes. Look around. One step is busy while the other one squirts. A limousine will greet you at the next artery. My nebula pulls on it subversively and creates espresso. Feels like my soul has turned into steam. So chew right, we modified a violin. Cod over what hope bungles. Cod on what hope wastes. Good cod. I just saw Milwaukee. It was so completely charming I couldn’t stop smiling. And now I go around clinging affectionately to bicycles. Abstractions waxed our rumbling summer. Later, when no one is looking, in slips the inspirations that we wrinkle. The within lifts our deliverance. A voyage without a phonograph like butter without jam. So I stayed home. And lied down on the bed. And voyaged the ceiling. I saw a big red truck. The motor made a noise by smelling its own velocity. And lowered itself on a thin silk thread. Just to say hello. Then go back up. Twist the old contrasts in a Spanish hotel. I’m growing myself as I hold it together with a woman. There are lyrics to manage the dashboard of my private accent. Waste nothing. Except waste. However spectral my bang, they expand it toward the end. Gasoline this mingle cake to our benefit. Some wobble will be needed to achieve climax. My mind is bouncing around the room. It’s out of control. It could use a theorem. Or the harsh realities of winter, which are out there now, howling. It’s the junkyard grammar that forces us forward, and causes iron to brood. Grope the dance we bruise with our museums. The lobster tugs on my impenetrable gloom and makes an art out of it. And this is where the tuna comes in. My boat is out broken on the shoal this morning. The interior is insinuating, but generous in its conceits. The landscape is crucial to a decision involving a sudden clarity. But it’s even more important to pay attention to the weather, the shape of the hull, and the vagaries of oysters.