Anything Can Happen

Anything can happen. It’s a hell of a time to be alive. A little introspection can go a long way. But’s it’s not as quick as being there. I have a duty to observe the moon. I built a telescope with golden nails and a silver saw. The best time to plant a word in a sentence is 8:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. But much is contingent on the tides, and the phases of the moon, and your willingness to go along with any of this. Look: in a second or two a lobster will crawl toward a can of luminous paint and pine for glory in the glow of an acetylene sneeze. The elevator will hover in indecision. We’ll get there eventually and the doors will slide open to the glory of a new floor & a new desk. There’s plenty of cable left over to lift a stanza into your stock portfolio, and thrive. But a poet grabbing at treasures and treats while working hard to get it all down on paper where it will languish in obscurity, turning dark and fermenting, essentially, until heady fumes of reverie fill the room and Lisbon explodes into goldenrod, is taking on a huge irresponsibility. I sometimes find that a little too much certitude can quarantine a healthy skepticism. And so I come to understand the metaphysics of imperfection, how perfect it is, inflammable and flawed.

I work in a cheerless basement. Voltaire is wax. I have to keep things cool. Cool as reason. If a radical forsythia accepts its eyebrows, it’s not my place to garnish it with a Bohemian allegory and a complete secretion of truth. Today it’s my suspenders holding my pants up while holding me down. Tomorrow it could be Puerto Rico and coconut milk. I don’t know anymore. It’s all up for grabs. Try fishing for an hour in a chasm below Cincinnati. You’ll see what I mean. Some books are to be tasted, others chewed into earthquakes. Some books are to be fished like mountain rivers, others bent into participles. Some books are chapels, others propel nouns across a terrain of spouts and fumaroles. Clicking moves my confusion toward punctuation. It is here I chose to sit and knit a carrot with imaginary wool. I believe they call it wool-gathering. I turned it into a career. I could’ve used this sentence in a different paragraph. But I chose to put it here.

I once built things. Plays, sonnets, displays of wit and unseemliness. My shirt translates existence as an ironing board so that a hot steam can understand it. This was back when universities championed free speech and Socratic maieutics. I love free speech. I urge it at every verge and tendency. I speak with an unfiltered tongue and find it a blessing to perform miracles of misinformation for kisses and fanfare. I’ll do anything. I once shot a comma with a coincidence. One gets used to the hard oak bench in a municipal courthouse. You can resist beauty but you can’t resist charm. We manage to disconcert whatever the language provides, and yet survive. I once found work as a chain of elegance. I got fired, of course. I reinvented myself by attaching antennas to my body and waiting for frequencies of gnostic understanding to light up my balls.

In the old days friendships were based on kitchen conversations. They were very informal, but extended far and spontaneously into cosmic equations and the infinitely amusing behavior of cats. We would stand there drinking in one another’s arms. We pleaded for colors to dance in a cube of air. And as new details emerged we packed out suitcases and went in search of true meaning, which proved to be a chimera, a walnut waltz in a chintz abalone. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s not why I’m here. Fact is, I never did get to the bottom of that little conundrum. If you can’t find it in Max Jacob, you might find it in Gilgamesh. Keep looking. If you smell fragrances of lavender and myrrh, you’re probably not in Chicago. Try Wisdom, Montana, in the Big Hole Valley. I can’t promise you satori. But I guarantee you’ll love the sky.