The Holiness Of Holes

Did you know that if you wear green on St. Patrick’s Day Krispy Kreme will give you a free doughnut?

I wonder what happens to unsold doughnuts. Do their bodies disintegrate leaving behind a hole? Where do holes go when things fall apart? They cluster together in holy places. There are four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire alone.

My eyes occupy two holes in a somewhat spherical skull, two holes in my nose, two holes in my ears, a hole in my rear, and a hole beneath my nose which only appears when it opens and words come streaming out in a spectral wavelength of ultraviolet frequencies.  

The biggest hole in the world is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Kola Peninsula of Russia, near the border with Norway. It descends seven miles deep in the earth’s crust.

The word ‘hole’ appears 26 times in 253 speeches within 39 works of Shakespeare.

As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney,

as your French crown for your taffeta punk, as Tib’s

rush for Tom’s forefinger, as a pancake for Shrove

Tuesday, a morris for May-day, as the nail to his

hole, the cuckold to his horn, as a scolding queen

to a wrangling knave, as the nun’s lip to the

friar’s mouth, nay, as the pudding to his skin.

 

-          All’s Well That Ends Well, Act II, scene 2. Clown.

 

Nun’s lip to the friar’s mouth. Whoa. What’s that about? What’s a nun’s lip doing on a friar’s mouth?

We originate from holes. Take a long sweet look at Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World. It is the holiest of holes.

Some physicists speculate that what we perceive as cosmic inflation – some sort of field that provides an energy inherent to space itself – an energy so robust and powerful it causes the universe to inflate, refusing to dilute even as the expansion of space continues – marks the creation of our universe from an ultramassive black hole.

I often fantasize walking into a wormhole and reentering the year 1966. The year Blonde on Blonde came out, and Aftermath and Sunshine Superman and Sounds of Silence and Fresh Cream and the Moods of Marvin Gaye. A hamburger, on average, cost 15 cents, and a two-bedroom house went for about $21,400.

The rock group Hole, with lead vocalist Courtney Love, disbanded in 2002. The hole itself, the idea hole, the many perforations and performances of holes, holes as a group, holes upon holes upon holes, echoing with tender invitations to be entered, to be filled, to be fulfilled, to be nucleated and nudged into interplay, is hunkered in a hollow somewhere, forlorn as a lover on a dock scanning the horizon for a ship, hollow as the hoop of hope on a chimney on a hill, fueled by nothingness and fire, crackling and alone. 

A Trinket Of The Mind

You can say bliss is yellow. You can call to the root of the baobab during a storm on the plains of Zimbabwe. You can write a paragraph that flames like a mushroom in a forest of words. But to create a fact with a luxurious sting you must drink the flight of the hummingbird.

An iron knowledge helps establish a meaningful wind in the life of a hippopotamus. And yet the ink that dreams of being a nail will sometimes be confused with a swamp.

This is a book of radar in a ginger terrain. Here, scratch the snowball card. This will prove that money is hurt by nicknames.

I mixed a nightcap with a nightclub and found a hibiscus in my shame.

What beautiful foam this water makes. The intake is a dagger. It’s like a mouth one blurs with quintessence.

Is this getting anywhere yet?

Eggs drink buttons. It’s how chaos moves through a sentence. I rattle my birth at a little aroma. It gives me a sense of scarlet identity. Out on the prairie time has mellowed our noises. Our pearls of rain mimic the bustle of sage.

I see enough reason for an alpine shadow that I hurry to sell it to the moon. It's a beautiful night. The stars are scattered like ingots of golden vertigo. Somewhere near Cutbank an elephant smells raspberries in the sweet prairie air. Memories of Botswana warm her mind.

The state of being is to be considered as an ebony ambiguity becoming correlative to all things through a trinket of the mind. How might an ambiguity be lipstick if it already has a diameter? The reason is simple. Because percussion has a gnome in it. And his name is Kolbein Butter Penis.

Blink against the wall showing off the spoke of the wheel. Step forward. Take a breath. Jump to me now suggesting darkness. Together we will move forward through the sentence allowing the rain to belong to the waves. And in the end cause beautiful things to happen to our bodies.    

 

What Makes Rock Rock?

What makes rock rock? Or should I say what made rock rock? Rock is dead. I think. I don’t know anymore. Intricacies abound in the daily phantasmagoria. Everything that constitutes life comes into focus. Ginger Baker in a frenzy of sticks and rhythm. There are days I can feel all the cells in my body subtly vibrating with cosmic cymbals. This is generally an indication that I’m pregnant with something fine and elegant, an embryonic opera swirling in a turbulence of light and darkness or elephants grazing together in the savannah of my private musings. The brain is a womb of musings, unending elaborations of Sein und Zeit. The labor went hard but the delivery was a success: a 9 lb. sonnet howling with magma and crystallizations of raw perplexity.

I’ve love to write about rock but I know very little about music, and having never played it, I don’t have a visceral sense of what’s going on. Writing about music is a difficult project if you know little about the construction of music. Of course, everyone, even the deaf, know something about music. It’s rhythmic, it creates vibrations, and it’s lively as a nest full of cuckoos. Unless it’s not. Unless it’s soft and reflective like still water in moonlight. A frog on a rock like a note on a sonata. The steady languorous rhythms of an albatross in flight, à la Peter Green.

Beethoven, who was nearly deaf, used a pencil in his mouth to catch the vibrations of the piano. He could tell by the vibrations the sound as it emanated from the string and permeated the wood.

Here’s what I do know: rock changed everything in my life. I remember the very afternoon it grabbed my soul and yanked it out of the dingy adolescent cell it was crouching in and let it loose as a Blakean angel. The song was “House of the Rising Sun,” sung by Eric Burdon. It had everything in it: New Orleans, a life of decadence and ruin seeking redemption in a desperate howl of epiphany and pain. It’s an intense song. It was the intensity of this song that grabbed me and shook me and made me turn into Arthur Rimbaud. Who doesn’t mythologize their past when they hear this kind of music? It’s different with a piece of music like Mahler’s Adagietto. This is what you listen to when you’re old and at the brink of something sublime. Mountain summit looking down. Lights changing and oscillating in movements across the long grass of the valley.

What makes rock rock is a strong backbeat, usually in 4/4 rhythm. It’s an emphasized offbeat. Unconventional, unusual. It hooks you with its off-kilter bravura. Going against the grain of what is expected. A sly contrariness leading you into a spirited confrontation with propriety. Propriety has its place. It helps people exchange ideas without killing one another. But it’s confining. It can be deadening. This is why rock and roll upset the world so much circa the early 50s, beginning with Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” in 1951, and culminating with Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” in 1955.

The most vigorously idiosyncratic drumming appears in the Beatle’s “Come Together.” Ringo was left-handed, and so the drumming is shaped naturally around that idiosyncratic style. I’ve watched several videos of drummers demonstrating the complexity of drumming propelling this zany song, and it left me feeling dizzy with its rhythmic intricacies.

The electric guitar is essential. Or is it? There’s no guitar in the Beatle’s “Eleanor Rigby,” or Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” That said, the electric guitar is pretty important. Bo Diddley wouldn't sound Diddley without Diddley’s Jupiter Thunderbird. It wouldn’t have a spine. It wouldn’t have Bo. It wouldn’t have Diddley. That diamond ring won’t shine. No mojo. No cocoa. No cat black bone.

Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” is mainly an E minor pentatonic with a bit of Dorian. The guitar work is lush and classical, serving a wistful melody with a heavy flavor of what the Portuguese call saudade. It opens with an acoustic guitar and builds into a powerful crescendo of fury and spiritual dilation. I think it’s much more moving than Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” I prefer Zeppelin’s more obscure numbers, like “Boogie with Stu.” The goofy Tolkienesque lyrics don’t really synchronize that well with the edginess and bite of an electric guitar.

And then there’s the most iconic beginning to a rock song in the Stone’s “Satisfaction,” the fuzz tone distortion produced by the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone seemed perfect for a song about the eternal dissatisfactions of consumer culture.

I don’t know where rock is today. I’m almost 77. I don’t go to clubs. My auditory system couldn’t take it. I’ve experienced heavy hearing loss and as early as 1966 acquired a lifelong case of tinnitus. Most of my listening is done with a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. Sometimes I keep my hearing aids on, and sometimes I remove them. They tend to distort music. They have minimal effect on most of the rock I listen to, but completely destroy the more delicate sounds of classical music.

That said, going a single day without music is unthinkable. I agree with Nietzsche: “without music, life would be a mistake.” 

Improprieties Of Property

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his chapter on “Property Considered as a Natural Right,” refers to a “frenzy of possession.” Marvelous phrase, which perfectly captures United Stares culture. 90% of time, energy and innovation in the United States is devoted to the acquisition of things. Possessing things. Which involves money, and predation and borrowing and loaning and trickery and thievery and skilled labor and unskilled labor and misery and tedium and sometimes – if you’re lucky – having a blast performing on a stage, which is more a matter of being possessed than possession.

The other 1% of time is spent in waiting rooms, dressing rooms, bus depots and airports, scrolling up and down a screen on a mobile phone, gossiping, talking, adjusting a seatbelt, reading a map, hanging out in bars hoping to get lucky, reading menus and laboring to keep a conversation going without veering into politics or religion, which can be quite dangerous in these times of hypersensitivity and paranoia.

Why do people in our society crave ownership so much?

The legal definition of property in the United States is “anything (items or attributes/tangible or intangible) that can be owned by a person or entity. Property is the most complete right to something; the owner can possess, use, transfer or dispose of it.”

That doesn’t sound very exciting, at least on the surface. The complete right to something excites libidinal thoughts and – in many instances I’m sure – assholes exercising this principle in abusive and exploitative ways. But maybe that’s just me and my cynical mind. A right to something can also mean right to a bed and shelter, right to food, right to speak one’s mind, in which case language is the item in question, nobody owns a language. At least I hope not. Right to travel freely, right to plant vegetables and flowers and till the earth and fertilize it however one chooses, right to keep a collection of postage stamps in a locked drawer, right to take certain drugs and medications, right to an attorney, right to medical attention, right to modes of transport, especially private forms of travel, in which one can drink whatever one wants and gaze out a window and not have to think a single thought. Right to a thought means what, exactly? You have a right to think whatever one wants. And sell it to the highest bidder.

Intellectual property is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect and imagination; the best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. It does seem odd that something with no physical existence, no boundaries or weight, no density or texture, no smell or color can be considered property in any conception of property however stretched or inflated it may be. If I imagine a speech balloon propelled by a glass propeller proving the existence of God does that become a property? Can I sell it to a baseball enterprise? Will it buy me a house in Malibu? Can I auction it off at Sotheby’s?

I think God would have some say in the matter. Is the idea of God a form of property? Clearly, nobody can possess God. Of course, if anyone did, they’d have one hell of a bodyguard.

“The whole strength of the State is at the service of each citizen,” Proudhon wrote. “The obligation that binds them together is absolute. How different with property! Worshipped by all, it is acknowledged by none: laws, morals, customs, public and private conscience, all plot its death and ruin.”

Property is anti-social. The items most illustrative of this phenomenon are books. I remember doing a lot of visiting in my 20s, and everybody had books, everybody loved books and everybody read books, and bought books and talked about books and wrote recommendations about books. Almost every time a friend would visit, they would scour my library and pull out a book with excitement and ask to borrow the book. It felt wrong to say no. Books are communal. There’s some inherent quality books possess that makes them immune to the poisons of possession. This is certainly not be the case with online magazines and other similar entities that ask for a fee. Nobody possesses words, but if the words are arranged a certain way, arranged to convey knowledge in the clearest way possible or arranged for aesthetic purposes, to create a certain feeling or sensation or cause the mind to dilate and disburden itself of harmful ideologies and conceptions, then it has value as something to possess. Possession, however, is not the right word. The right word is access. You may be asked for a fee in order to gain access to the pixels holding the content in place. This is not anti-social, exactly, but it does impose burdensome conditions on someone’s time and financial resources.

Morality comes into play during times of extreme inequities between shelter and resources. The city I live in – Seattle – is extremely expensive. The minimal amount required to buy an average house in Seattle is an annual income of $200,000 dollars. I thought this was ludicrous when I first read it. I thought the only people who make $200,000 a year were Hollywood actors, corporate lawyers and gifted neurologists and heart surgeons. Turns out quite a few trades and professions pay that amount. But it’s still far from average. Most people are struggling to make rent and put food on the table. And a lot of people have fallen into the most inhumane circumstance of all, which is homelessness. The most conspicuous aspect of morality here is its complete absence.

Proudhon famously said that “property is theft.” The hoarding of wealth keeps it out of circulation. And wealth buys power, particularly the capacity to insure legislation favorable to the acquisition of more wealth and more power, while removing goods and services from the public, and further impoverishing those whose assets keep shrinking. “Behind every great fortune,” said Balzac, “is a great crime.”

Ok, but what about someone like Taylor Swift or Paul McCartney, musicians who made ginormous fortunes writing songs and making music? There was nothing criminal in their actions. You can’t arbitrarily demonize the rich and expect to maintain a solid grip on the morality of money. Which is why I say thank God for cognitive dissonance. The dissonance of being rich. And the propensity of property to become private. One man’s privacy is another man’s deprivation. And who isn’t galvanized by dreams of plenty, luxuries and exhilarating freedoms? Is there a balance to this picture, or anything like a center that serves to make it coherent?

Wealth and poverty are polar extremes, but not polar opposites. A young man in good health in a one-bedroom apartment is wealthier than a billionaire with pancreatic cancer. That’s your center. Life itself. Life is nobody’s property. I don’t own my body. I am my body. And my body owns me.

 

A Mood Comes Up From Behind

I’m not as autonomous as I like to think. A mood comes up from behind and gives me a push. I punch around in the air looking for a mood or something I can fight. Most of my feelings are figments of something I’ve imagined. I hear the tinkle of glasses. The fizz of champagne. I have an attitude after me now. It catches me during an idle moment when my attention is drawn to a nude in a Finnish sauna. The attitude twists my arm. I’m compelled now to perform wonders, however banal they seem to the unelected. If it's snowing I roar the parallels. The analogous. The comparable. And assorted maps. I’m going to Deadwood. I hear they’ve got eggnog. And gold and loose women. There are fortunes to consider when an absence sublimates steam. Experience is a contraption like a spoon. You stick it in your mouth, give it a lick and wipe it clean.

My castle is a palette of detonating rain. I see things as they exist not as how they might exist. Language alters nothing. But it reveals everything. Makes things real. Weirdly real. Really real. Surreal. Real as snow. The crisp kind that crunches underfoot alerting the wolf packs to your presence. Two weeks later I was on a mission to Mars. This is how things happen when words take control. Nuances and wharves. Middle-aged people getting sloppy drunk on a cruise ship while passing over unimaginable depths and bioluminescent fish. Does any of this sound familiar? Welcome aboard, my friend. Let me tell you something. I grew up believing in acne. Later, when I became a man, I abandoned bobsledding for shuffleboard. I love the ocean. Love the rolling of waves. It’s why I agreed to a round of golf with the pope. I love the interactions of letters. And on some nights I can hear the metaphors stirring among the banalities of this world.

I may be at liberty to say anything I want, but I will need a pound of grammar to begin. Let’s begin at the toolshed. There is a footprint, there is a shovel oozing darkness. Everything falls into place when a windshield intercedes with reality. All I get on the radio is static. I have a problem with invocations. They’re so solemn and inexact. You never know what you’re going to get. It might be a goulash of renegade abstractions, and it might be a Wichita sarsaparilla. Try not to sneer. It’s impolite to mouth emotions so insincerely. Never be ashamed of your nothingness. It’s the unspeakable that allows a cow to stand in our room expecting to be milked. Life is funny that way. I like Corot since I live in art like a pastel. It’s more than a fashion, it’s more like a foundry. The paradigm is red hot. We come riding out furiously on our ponies. I have cuticles to explore.

A steady rain absolves eternity of its endless somersault. It’s the cruelest joke that ever existed. Except the one about the pope, the donkey, and the Hollywood pimp. I’ve got to cut this out and get a decent job. Glitter invocation into my intentions. I must convince myself to tear the canvas off and reveal eternity for what it is. It’s more than a bus stop. It’s more like a pot of air for the consonants of our tenuity. It takes a long time to learn how to backslide into reflection. There are languages to learn, and soliloquys and songs. Everything is thin there due to the altitude. I see insects quickly disperse among the bottles. And mountains as far as the eye can see. A woman breaks out of the ice and offers me immortality. No thanks, I say. I like being temporary. She hurls the sky at me. I drift through downtown Omaha. Next time I’m calling an Uber.  

Dinner At Saint-Cirq-Lapopie

Midnight. Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. We sit down to eat. It’s a big table. Solid oak. The milieu is an accessory for the sequins everyone is wearing. Overhead is a chandelier. Under our feet are planks of roughhewn prose. The debris of letters whose subtleties unveil a world released from the lie of being truth. This is a place of refuge. No prescribed choices. This helps explain some of my biases, which were carpentered in the Black Forest by a group of innovative elves. It's always beneficial to reflect on things. What is love: a lampshade, or a bowl of ambrosia salad? Mitochondria are essential to the functioning of biochemical reactions. We should show them as much hospitality as possible. Propulsion starts with engineering & ends with butterflies. After that, life becomes a biological rather than theological matter. And we all have ecstasy for dessert.

8:45 a.m., Sunday. I put my hearing aids in and the soundscape immediately comes into high definition. I hear the rustle of my pants, the metallic clacking of letters on a keyboard, and think about the developments in writing in mid-nineteenth century western culture, when the image of the writer assumed the character of a craftsperson, who (in the words of Roland Barthes), "shuts himself away in some legendary place, like a workman operating at home, and who roughs out, cuts, polishes, and sets his form exactly as a jeweler extracts art from his material, devoting to his work regular hours of solitary effort." But now, in the digitalized world, that exaltation of language as an exacting and venerable art has been superseded by a culture of conformity and shallow entertainment, and writing relegated to the gratuitous monasticism of Lindisfarne in the Middle Ages. The monks feared Viking invasion. The writer fears the erosion of value.

The chair creaks whenever I get up to do something, get a glass of water or feed the cat. The creaking audibly matches the strain in my legs with such accuracy that I often forget the creaking is coming from my chair and think it's coming from my legs. And sometimes I lean back and sip the solitude soaked in whatever scenery happens to be drifting around in my mind. Little details, like eluding a splinter or sealing a letter. Petting a cloud. The rustle of new wings moving by trial and error. The voice of an angel echoing in an aquarium. That weird smoky smell of candle wax. The excitement and anguish at the start of a revolt. How stellar it is to ship my freight and drive across Nevada on a Suzuki Intruder. Is that a detail or a dream? I think it’s the ignition of unburnt fuel in the exhaust system, or ceaselessly exploded clichés in a wilderness of words.

When I was young, I engorged with lyricism. Now that I’m old I engorge with oblivion. The universe becomes erotic. Because death is involved. And cataracts and arthritis. And moments of euphoria followed by despair followed by the ghosts of rock and roll past. Jackie De Shannon. Needles and Pins. Rosie Hamlin. Angel Baby. Merrilee Rush. Angel of the Morning. Which was written by Chip Taylor, who also did Wild Thing, Early Sunday Morning and Fuck All The Perfect People. I remember meeting Merrilee Rush. She was sitting on a stump in a woodsy yard somewhere near Burien, Washington. I was sitting on a stump, too. Feeling massively stumped. Couldn’t think of a thing to say. Don’t know why, lately, it has been popping into my mind. It’s one of those funny memories about something inconsequential that bubbles up for no reason, and yet holds a certain fascination, a certain mild excitement, and pops, sprinkling glitter on the void.

There’s an unparalleled resource beyond the obvious. I can sense it in Apollinaire. The trickle of interacting hymns. And great machinery. The night is a chamber of stars. My bed is the prairie. My radio is crickets. I feel Gothic. I feel melodic and imminent. Like hives. Like a pharmacy on the edge of town. Like a song about a woman who dropped her life into a microphone and created a sense of urgency in people’s lives. Darkness sees itself in our obscurity. This is where the story gets puzzling. The chameleon that walks on my nerves is thoroughly intuitive and trained in the martial arts, and yet it can never find a substance that can justify its choices. My life has been a lifelong conundrum. Is that such a bad thing? The dilemma of singularity can never by resolved by robots. It takes controversy, delirious mitochondria, and big mistakes. 

No better feeling than propofol diffusing into the bloodstream. Consciousness and all of its clatter and all of its clutter sublimating into a vapor of blithe inconsequence that is swept away by the breath of an angel. It’s on my mind constantly. This flirtation with death. With oblivion. With the void. It’s enticing. It’s beguiling. But I don’t want to feed it words. I just want let it exist as is. A vapor of blithe inconsequence. Nothingness is inherently unstable. It can’t exist without something. Nothing needs something to be nothing. It needs protozoans and hemoglobins and semicolons. Quarks popping in and out of existence. The crazy vagaries of dreams. Agates in the river Lot. Stars in a web of galaxies. And a staircase that leads nowhere. 

 

A Western Groove

I see a western groove tune itself in a pair of overalls and wonder if our cosmetics could have some fun together. Think of the wealth such union may bring, not to mention the propagation of various shampoos. Maybe next time. You look like you’re in a hurry. I’ll shave now, and attend to my hygiene. You may not see me tomorrow. I like wandering. They say the sea is good for that. But today, I'm at the yellow theater watching a nuance get guttural with a slattern. It's a complicated play, more like an undulation than an adumbration. But with a touch of Beckett. Slopping around in a gallon of amusement. So easy to imagine. So hard to perform in a bucket.  

Do you feel punctilious? I don't. Not at all. I'm not even necessary. Nor am I good at poker. The introversion is just a disguise. I made it up so that I could dance with a skeleton on the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m home now, sighing, weeping, laughing maniacally. I feel so unfettered at times I have to sit down and look at a Rembrandt. The browns and russets bring me back to earth. Luxuries like this are never innocent. But it’s not friendly to deny things. Better to accept what’s there. Especially despair. Writing is an accompaniment to despair, a vain extravagance, like Charles Olson wearing a helmet of porcupine fish skin to a wedding. It is often lauded as a transformative energy. I think of it as the rupture of expectation by the rapture of predication.  

I get lyrical around sand. I can feel it. The sand between my toes. The fervent waves breaking against the rocks. The city lights to the south are tantalizing. We move with disproportionate fluidity towards whatever destiny offers. Our arrival is met with hullaballoo, firecrackers and madness. A turbulent universe emboldens everyone on the sidewalk. They dance with abandonment and frenzy. This is our chance. We can do it. We hold the power. To change the mind. Detonate conceptions that control nothing, but thunder it like hell. The art of the parable makes me a little shaggy and nervous at the wheel. I'm old now. All the decisions have been made. But so long as there are subtleties of voice, we can deepen our understanding of sand.

I like the sound of fanning paper money in my hand. Is this because it’s lost so much value due to inflation that now it’s really mostly paper? Was my perception occluded by the commercial power of the dollar when the dollar still held market value, or did it engorge with the pulse of poetry, whose value is incalculable, because it’s phantasmal, and variegated, and backed by abstraction? Matter matters when it matters. It's very funny to make declarations of things. The house of language has a fast current running through it today. Let’s get lawless and boil our hope in deutsche marks. The heart holds life. I just let it sit there for a day or two until it marinates fully in Rembrandt. And then I take it down from the hearth and release it into the wild.

Art elevates our autumn to the status of a chimney despite the actual palette, which is bedrock. I see in it a detail of stars and stripes. I get a rise out of art. If we discuss it this summer, I will give it a push. If its components chew mint, then we are the minions of thyme. Here it is. I found it. Charles Olson’s proprioception. It was in the closet the whole time, hanging there like a small evergreen government. I must say I really like denim. Something about it shouts Wyoming. Monument Valley. The prairies in both the Dakotas. If denim is a problem it excuses whatever makes this world so busy. Busy with sugar. Busy with bananas. And empire and trumpets. Many romantic ideas were based on the banana. Some call this an enigma, others a conundrum, and still others a dirigible. I call it a trombone. We now have a diagnosis over rubbing what the exhibition engendered, which was nothing less than ink. I have a photosynthetic tattoo.

One night as I gazed at the sky I thought I saw Wisconsin and spurred my horse. I like to take long gallops in the open air. I look for subtleties of balance and interplay. One day I stopped to pick a fight with a hesitation. I found a language and folded it into a flower. Meaning is a device made of wire and snow. It's a dart that pins my war to the wall. I find it hard to be spontaneous socially. But you have to be. If you want to interact with life, you’ve got be willing to take a punch to the groin, and a grudge to the dance. Nipple sticks are everywhere. A nipple stick is a form of rosary. Lightning is a nipple stick. It comes with a warranty and a pair of earrings and fits nicely in a tool belt. But no. I don’t know why there’s something instead of nothing, and that if a thing isn’t forbidden by the jaws of quantum gherkins, it’s guaranteed to happen. If this little emulsion of awe can soothe your ecstasies you can glue pieces of me to the axle. I’ll understand.

Here’s an idea: make an analogy out of wire and paper mâché, then compare it to a jigsaw. The pointlessness is exhilarating. It may or may not manage to capture fully our sense of what things are, or if that was even the intent. It exceeds the limits of understanding. I don’t know what it’s trying to comfort, what it’s trying to convey. We’re in the country of the silly, where consciousness thrives without a subject, and the drawers are plump with gadgets. A good word or two might gratify a usurpation but it can never take the place of ointment. When a man loves a woman, can’t keep his mind on nothin’ else. What does that tell you about existence and being? It tells me that a pot should have enough soil in it to support the plant, and control is illusory. 

 

My Skinny Lily

R tells me that what I want is daylight. This is in reference to a light bulb. I’d prefer a daylight bulb, a bulb designed to replicate the tone of light emitted from the sun, so they can reach up to 6,500 Kelvins, and are usually a crisp and invigorating light source, in which chestnuts sparkle like crime and waves of quicksilver lucidity diffuse space with uncanny delicacy. This will be for my new lamp, which I ordered from Home Depot, and assembled on the living room floor, like building a flower, an extremely skinny lily, with a small white cone bending down in happy splendor.

I watch a YouTube video on light. It’s in French, so that I can feel fancy when I’m trying to shed light on light. Light consists of electromagnetic waves characterized by their level of energy and intensity. It travels by wavelength. It doesn't oppose anything. It imbues. It penetrates. It goes around. It bends. It's too light for nothing. Nothing is bitter. Nothing is everything. Light can't butter anything so insistently dark that it can’t spit skin at a vacant fetish.

Picture a stream of wavelengths beating into a lush mud slide. This will tell you all you need to know about our planet. The rest is kept in a vault in the Vatican. It walks around like a sequel of bones in a cathedral panegyric. All religions are the same, so your coupon is good at all mosques and synagogues. Tell them a swamp sent you. And that it smelled of waffles.

A consonant rubs my mouth to find a vowel. That’s not where I keep my vowels. You’ve come to the wrong place, my dear. Keep on going until the kangaroo finds justice in a cemetery. No one has told this story before. Because it hasn't happened yet. No one has a memory of things that haven't happened yet, except Mr. Super Future, who lives next door to himself in a warm reminiscence. That zone we call our hodgepodge hinges on a plurality blessed with pyramids and papyrus. But if it worries you, just don’t give a damn, and everything falls into place. The sun rises to the east, the moon is in Scorpio, and the skulking incendiary of a dying culture is ugly as the end of a road on the coast of reality. The sexton is dead and the wind is slamming the door.  

We decide daylight might be wrong. We need a globe. Something globular. Daylight is bright. Too bright. Maybe what I need is a globe. Or a republic. The norm is gone. We live in a new zone now. I have whirlpools in my shoes and jewelry in my noodle. I feel frenzied as a hive of wasps at Easter. I must take it upon myself to be my flesh. To do what flesh wants. Because it keeps my bones hidden from view. And makes the world feel quizzical. The irony of life is that the older you get the more intensely you live. Bleeding hearts grow best in full sun. If you follow this sentence to the end you’ll find that it has no point. But did you notice the fish were noble and expressed themselves by wandering through the water in quest of nothing of interest to us?