This Is What The Poem Does

This is what a poem does: it topples over and begs to have its belly rubbed. Which turns out to be surprisingly cold. The gloom of December in the northern latitudes. Where the broadloom glees in warp and the treadle glees in weft and all the metals of the realm shine in immediate value. There are castles. And mythologies. Fontainebleau: sculpture of a man stroking the head of a lion on the body of a horse. The idea of freedom. Which isn’t an idea. It’s a puffy piece of discord. Basically, a marshmallow. And the freedom to make it. And hold it. And eat it. A marshmallow is basically a foam that's stabilized by gelatin. But I have a different question. How can you tell if it's raining underwater? You can feel it rain underwater when the fish turn hypothetical. And a finger welcomes fingers like a leg welcomes feet. And we kiss in a foundry in a shower of sparks. And enjoy life. Heavy rain at the tip of your finger. Furtive glances at a bus stop. A typical fun day at the karate dojo. Getting thrown to the floor. And getting up laughing.

When I hear a sound on the sound I say the sound coming from the sound is the sound of the sound of the sound. The original sound. The prehistoric belch. Life is different now. It requires different skills. Deceit and confabulation. Imagine a life wrapped in lies. This is life as it is lived in the present moment, AI getting rich off other people’s work, the tongue tip popping like candy. Nevertheless, some things remain relentlessly real. Did you know, for example, that King Charles has an enlarged prostate? Combine geology with majesty and you get the San Juans. The leap of killer whales amid storm-driven waves. I remember, age 12, new to Seattle from Minneapolis, the Ivar’s menu with the cartoon of a man sitting under an umbrella in the rain with the caption “keep clam.” Calm is neither a crustacean or an exhumed body propped up on a chair. No, it is not those things. It is sometimes coaxed into one’s being by flirtation and melodious echoes rising from the void, but it is best achieved by concentration. Try to be still. Try to focus. Feel yourself feeling yourself. As soon as the chirp begins, your tongue tip will begin to give off synchronized tingles onto your tongue. And you will be glad and propagate.

I’ve learned a few things in my time. The primary lesson to be learned in human society is that rarely, rarely does anything make any sense. But that’s no excuse to crawl into a nice warm meaningless bed of nihilism and dream your life away. One should iron with cause and determination to propagate abstraction. Abstractions heal. They heal because they crackle. They heal because they slide through consciousness like a big fat Buddha. They’re flagrant & mathematical. They are bazooka wallpaper with a misplaced aesthetic. But they seem to work. Nobody knows how. All we do know is that one day the weather was scarlet and the table smelled of wax. Our sadness tired of its paper daggers and became the actual memory of a crochet hook. We need to argue not because the cabin boy is enigmatic but because the tightrope walker is a calorie in our accordion. And every day new details emerge. Equations jingle with calculus. Olives ripen in Morocco. A goldfish remains still in a bowl, fins undulating in languor.

 

Turning The Heat Up

Planet Earth. December, 2024. A wide-eyed iron deity excites the skin. Helicopters crowd the sky. I sense something erotic in the air. I jump up the stairs just to touch your olives. Our boxing throbs upside-down. My big slap is in the flower.

Going into a cold room, turning the heat on and waiting for the heat to build then completely envelop you is one of the great pleasures in life. It’s quite similar to waiting for a drug to take effect, alcohol or cannabis, ecstasy or psilocybin. Feelings and perceptions change subtly, gradually, like when you're traveling by car or train and the landscape changes as you go from region to region, some hilly and densely forested, some mountainous and rocky, some flat and desolate, some smelling of sage, some written into the soil by tractors and ploughs. It is a form of inner metamorphosis, a discovery, as in adolescence, of feeling differently, seeing differently, delighting in novel complexities, feeling the metal of trumpets in a pool of violins.

The drug of life embroiders a sanguine hope. That there’s autonomy behind the thunder, elevation behind the bone. That red is red that green is green that brown is brown that oranges are orange and that pattern that is endemic to the history of plaid is the catalyst that awakens the enlivening actualities of black.

The paint stick accelerates the swirl of paint. Picasso’s muffin glows and crackles with abstraction. Is this because of words? The wood creaks as a character walks on stage. This is the language of wood. Fishnet stockings stiletto heels. The sink belongs in the kitchen. You can put it there if you use the right predicate. The wrong predicate will put it in a work of art. And make it do things improper to the use of predicates. As if anything were foreign or anomalous to a predicate. I assure you it is not. Is is a transitive verb. An ingot of red. Which is a poplar in the foreground. This is a sample of Fauve painting rendered in oil and thiamine with a thick brush of religion hanging from a sunbeam. Predicates are predicated on something, even if it’s just a forge. Backstage you'll see frost in the eyes of a mosquito, and the machinery of how it all happens. These aren’t predicates, these are more than predicates, these are stories. The stories are created to lift themselves into paradise, where the predicates are calm and graze on nouns.

Yellow is the color of joy. It’s also the color of caution. Of intellect. Of Anxiety. Of clarity. Of excess. Of sunlight. And crows and corn and a man painting crows in a field of yellow.

What drives the poem is reverie. The weight our sabotage. The light of our eyes. The ruby ​​has left us in darkness. But we have other minerals to pursue. The knowledge of which exceeds one's own cognition. There will be light to the east. While the west awaits our immodest assumptions.

It’s easy to speak to the dead, but hard to speak to the dying. You might as well be bowling. You feel so ineffective. Words tend to fade in the soft light of a hospital room. Nothing can reverse time or circumstance. Words lack the power to effect certain things. Like prolonging life. Power yields nothing without a fight. And what power do words have, when you’re up against fate? Destiny. Whatever you want to call it. There are words available for such things. Just don’t expect magic. Expect the unexpected. Life is full of surgery. And surrender and meatballs.  

Words are turkeys. Gobbledygook. But they make spectacular fodder for fairy tales. Think of me as a frog awaiting your kiss. The onion of whatever moment bristles with kites. We are all in a state of becoming. At least, that’s what I hear. That was me just a moment ago. And now I’m me again, until now, still in a state of becoming, which is unbecoming, because I’m still here, becoming foreign, becoming luggage, becoming maps and the leisure to study maps, becoming reflective, becoming omnivorous and spongelike, lingering in obfuscation, trying not to try to be somebody else, and try it without trying, and ending up on the dance floor, masquerading as Fred Astaire. But still me. Fantasizing. Driving a bus of Baptist schoolteachers to Puerto Vallarta. Not as Fred Astaire. Not as Richard Burton. But me: a young man in the dark chasing iguanas into the ocean I painted on the wall. And walking through a hole and coming out the other side somewhere in Finland, where the fun is, and the streets of Helsinki, and the fiery wet of a sauna.  

 

The Case Of The Phantom Paperclip

I was sitting on the steps in the entryway to our apartment building taking off my running shoes when I spotted a paperclip on the floor. I assumed it had fallen from the mail that R had just taken from our mailbox. Once my shoes were removed, I went down to pick it up. I looked down, but I didn't see it. How could this be? I’d just been looking at it. Did it stick to the bottom of my foot? Nope. Did it somehow manage to slide under the welcome mat? Nope. I closely examined the floor, which is covered by a dark brown carpet with a dense nap. It was nowhere to be seen. I entered our apartment and got a flashlight and came back out to look some more. No sign of a paperclip anywhere. What the hell. Did I hallucinate a paperclip? Had it been an optical illusion? Why would I hallucinate a paperclip? I mean, they’re handy, but I don’t think they’re worth a hallucination. People hallucinate demons and angels. All sorts of things. But paperclips?

I was sure it had been real. The paperclip had the exact appearance of a medium-sized paperclip. There was nothing remotely odd or distorted about it. Nothing that would suggest it was a minor hallucination, a harmless perceptual anomaly. It drove me crazy. The world can survive with one less paperclip in it. That’s not what bothered me. What bothered me is reality. Things in the mundane, empirical world of Newtonian laws – the human universe - don’t pop in and out of existence like virtual particles in the vacuum of space. Virtual particles are theoretical, short-lived particles that manifest as temporary fluctuations of energy. They tend to appear in pairs due to the fundamental principle of conservation of energy and momentum in quantum field theory; when a virtual particle is created from the vacuum, it must simultaneously create a corresponding antiparticle to maintain the overall charge and other quantum numbers as zero, effectively "borrowing" energy from the vacuum for a very brief time before annihilating each other, and disappearing. But that’s not where we live. The human universe is dense with predictability, solid as a fireplace grate and as true and undeniable as the red glow of the logs it cradles. In Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s world, fire represents the underlying principle of the universe, the material basis of an orderly universe. He had nothing to say about paperclips.

The inexplicable is not a good feeling. Things don’t just disappear. Imagine pulling out a chair to comfortably sit down and having it disappear the minute your buttocks – anticipating a nice, cushioned landing – find nothing but empty space and you end up on the floor. Or plunging a fork into a bite of ribeye and the ribeye vanishes and your fork comes down hard on a plate of fine bone china, sans rib eye. Nothing there. Maybe a bit of sauce. What the hell? Did it come to life and get up and walk away? Go to the men’s room? Should you call the waiter and ask for another rib eye, as the one you were about to eat suddenly vanished?  

Or, let’s say you’ve got to clean the gutters on your roof. You get a ladder from your garage and set it against the wall and put your foot on the bottom rung of a ladder and - no rung. Just empty space.

Or during a long sea voyage you come upon a ship at sea, everything intact, everything normal, except there’s no crew. This actually happened. December 5^th, 1872, the British brigantine Dei Gratia happened upon a disheveled but still seaworthy ship called the Mary Celeste with its sails slightly torn and moving in the wind but with no crew aboard. Not a soul.

This is not the kind of reality I signed up for. I mean sure, things do disappear over time. People die. Pets die. Land masses are swallowed by the ocean. Lakes dry up. Cities are deserted. Empires fall. But not all at once. Not one minute there then next minute gone. Not like that. This is a circumstance with far-reaching implications. Today it’s a paperclip, tomorrow it might be a car. Or a house. Or a wife. Or a father. Or a mother. Brother sister cousin uncle. Who knows?

It doesn’t help that I’ve never felt especially secure about our reality. I’ve seen too many abrupt changes over the years. Friends turn suddenly sullen, or bitter. Lovers who once doted on you begin undermining your confidence with stinging, sarcastic criticisms. People who were once passionate about social justice begin ranting about how lazy the homeless are, or providing justifications for the use of terrible weapons in foreign countries.

And now – due to climate change – the entire planet is undergoing a colossal transformation with ominous implications for the survival of the human species.

It’s not an especially friendly universe. It works in mysterious ways. There’s so much phenomena out there that doesn’t fit a logical framework. Dark matter, for example, the mysterious substance that makes up a huge portion of the universe’s mass, causing discrepancies in gravitational calculations of galaxy rotation, but eludes the detection of our finest technology.

Or that dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe, what’s that?

Or consciousness, emotions, God. Self-awareness, sexuality, the origins of life. Why do cows stand along the Earth’s magnetic poles – facing north and south – whenever they’re grazing or resting? Why did mammals return to the sea and become whales and seals and dugongs? Why do certain plants contain alkaloids such as morphine? Why does biodiversity increase as you approach the equator? How did Argentine ants manage to colonize across three continents?

And why does anything exist at all?

I looked again the next day. Not a sign of a paperclip. Not a sign of anything. Not even a tack. Or a stray brad. Or a bobby pin. Or a rubber band. Or a piece of lint. Or a button or a barrette. Nada. Just dark brown carpet and the silence of the hallway.

And I keep wondering why, why a paperclip? Why not a tarantula? Why not a capsule or a pill or a lozenge? Something with a little mystery. Something to which a narrative might stick. Paperclips are such inane objects. Why would I hallucinate something that tame, that insipid, that tedious, that uninspiring? Was this the revenge of a bureaucrat, the prank of a policy-making poltergeist? What the hell is reality anyway? What’s holding it all together? Besides a paperclip.

Somewhere South Of The Nearest Reality

If I aim the arrow I have just now manufactured out of air, and because it's a simple word, assembled with syllables and myths and the wisdom of the morpheme, and hisses and whistles and bears the weight of my convictions, and is pointed and quartz, it will pop the balloon of the simulacrum surrounding us and sparkle in our nerves like spontaneity. We will all see that fat sphere of false reality come tumbling down in shreds of illusion, wondering what to do now that our balloon is gone, our delusions gone, our beliefs gone, our chimeras and fables gone, and a new reality has taken their place, which is both correspondent to our senses and velvet to our touch. That said, the texture of text is not always velvet. Sometimes it's coarse and widespread  and unfolds in a thousand tin angels and mysterious dirt roads, some going east, some going west, some going north and some are off to a sideshow somewhere south of the nearest reality.

I think you know what I’m getting at. The audience might be leaving. But the performance isn’t over. There are secrets to reveal, confessions to make, grudges to vent and blizzards to face.

Not to mention so many things unstated, things that must be said and are never said.

Give me a call. We’ll talk about it. We’ll get things solved. But if this is a recording, wait for the beep. I’m not here right now. I stand behind these words. That’s why you can’t see me. All you see is words. These words. Heady, vivacious, buoyant words. Words swirling in words. Like twigs in a river. Like turtles. Like blood. Like the glare of sunlight on Puget Sound in winter.

And a thousand other things that are on my mind this first day of December. And so much to remember. And so much to forget.

Right now, I’m a little preoccupied. Engorged, let’s say. Indulged by my own inclinations and left to my own resources. Absorbed. Immersed. Lost in thought. Found in absentia. Deeply focused. Senselessly abstruse.

I’m focused on tomorrow morning’s doughnuts. You can’t put your arms around a memory. But you can put your mouth around a doughnut. I like the ones powdered with the fine white dust of heaven. They say heroin is not always a wise choice. Sometimes what is most needed isn’t even necessary. It’s just a stray thought looking for some words to crawl into and become something, a circumference and a hole. In other words, something like a doughnut. Vegetables get complicated. Broccoli requires a chassis of multilayered prose. And the rhetoric of carrots is often tractional, and involves traffic. And if it lies amid ferns in the forest and looks injured, stand back and let it breathe. It’s probably nothing. It might be a mirage or a perturbance in the space-time continuum. It might be a snow globe or ultimate meaning. Or maybe just a doughnut.