Dumb Dark And Gray

Is there a recipe for chimera? They say the meat of the chimera is tender as hope and sweetened with the juice of illusion. It must first be pounded with a giant desperation, marinated in bitter rumination, then baked in a paragraph preheated with unobtainable desires. Later, after the table is set with great expectations, hungry emotions, & cutlery warm as tears, it’s time to serve the chimera. Some say it tastes like glory, others that it savors of desperate measures and fetishized asparagus. I followed a chimera to California one day. I tried to sneak up on it and surprise it, but as I approached, a giant reality pounced & ate it. Life is empty without at least one illusion. The illusion, for example, that life has meaning. Meaning is another tasty meat. It's best eaten raw, but if you put it in a poem, or a self-help book, which is its own special type of chimera, season it with prepositions and saleswomen. Make it convincing. Give it magnetism and crusades. Talk about it. Let people know where you’re coming from. Avalon. El Dorado. Cockaigne.

Glastonbury, near Pilton, where the Glastonbury Festival has featured T. Rex, Radiohead, Adele, Beyoncé and The Rolling Stones, was once known as the Isle of Avalon, where King Arthur was taken after the Battle of Camlann, in which his son Mordred stabbed him in the head with his sword. Keith Richards was but a young man when this happened. I can hear his chimera purring behind a Grammatico amp. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking. I Heard It Through The Grapevine begins in the key of betrayal. We all come to discover the treachery of snow on a sidewalk, the barely visible, potentially lethal sheet of crystal known as black ice. I don't know if there's a parable here, or one on the way, but high inflationary dollars do have a certain flair, the wizardry of illusion. The boldness of drawing wealth from a future that may or may not exist haunts the corner of North Euphoria & West Ecstasy. Sausages are sold here, and pretzels and popcorn.

Wassily Kandinsky turned to abstraction to bring reality to paint. People had begun mistaking pictures for paint, paint for pictures. Kandinsky incandesced into color. Geometric and biomorphic forms, curious entities with strong suggestions of intracellular life but without the domesticating definitions of easy identifiability. The mind is provoked into celestial organicism. Bold colors in a realm of endless metamorphosis. Luminous walls across a blue river. Radiant yellows, robust greens, squiggles of black sinuous as music. What feels like a flicker of red is an immersion in the abstract, the canvas strumming a herd of deities. It’s an aesthetic of heat, a fire in the logic of blue. The flutter of rebellion in a splodge of atomic tangerine. Or just plain heat.

Is there a fool in the dictionary? Yes, there is: one who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding. One who acts unwisely in a given occasion: I was a fool to subscribe to The Elegant Gaffe. Formerly, a member of a royal or noble household who entertained the court with jests and mimicry. The act of being foolish, such as making inversions invite the irrational into a whorl of living temperature. The ability, if not the compulsion, to turn the world upside down. To scoff at money, then do everything you can to get it. Devote yourself to a library of world literature as the world grows increasingly illiterate. And expect to get paid for it. Celebrate the use of lazy tongs at a word salad bar on a late-night poetry show called Dumb Dark and Gray. Make demands. Don’t let the academic system degrade it into being a mere specialization. Wear a funny hat. Put everything beyond the reach of logic. You’re there. Now honk your horn.