I Live In The Real World Now

Prowling the depths is my failure, not yours. You're too hard on yourself. You should read Henry Miller. He makes poverty look like brandy. The ability to make yourself at home anywhere is a huge criterion. It all depends on how much one is willing to tolerate the wallpaper. I painted a scratch of it against a squiggle of wind and the tangible became emphatic. Musical, even, like love-in-the-mist. Sensations can be rampant, even in old age. Sometimes overwhelming. My left knee yearns for the feel of ermine. But the rest of my body is devoted to rain. I like the feel of it on bare skin. The saunas of Finland are a good place to start spanking yourself with a bundle of birch twigs. It stimulates blood circulation and releases a fresh birch aroma. My slap was meant to awaken your inner subversive. Again. I can’t stress this too much. Read Henry Miller.

Or Anselm Hollo. Now there’s a poet who knows how to bend an intentionality into things that are unintended, but wonderful, like hallucinations, or the northern lights. He knows how to sit and listen to someone while their eyes glitter. He knows how to turn on the lights in order to make it dark outside. He can address his friends while sleeping. He has all the markings of a poet. You can see them through two layers of glass at the far end of the restaurant, where he sits eating lasagna and whose head is a glob of light.

I live in the real world now, which is disenchanted and drab. I’m not staying here long. Just long enough to get a paycheck. As soon as I’m off work I enter another dimension. I enter the non-work dimension. Which is a streaming service brought to me by spiritual frequencies.

On the way home, I see a crow land on a high wire between a gibbous moon and a jet approaching Sea-Tac. I think it might be a sign. If I were a prophet I might be able to interpret it. Utter that one little word ‘if,’ and you raise the hypothetical into actionable being. How much does Schubert Sonata by Mark Di Suvero weigh? My car keys feel like extrusions of gray light. We all have an infinite pocket we visit with our fingers from time to time. I envision Joseph Cornell at a garage sale. He finds a snow globe containing a thyroid gland. My thesis swallows it and it oozes triiodothyronine. I can’t stop tragedies from happening, nobody can, but something has to be done about American history. It’s time to start my hiatus. There’s a chair over there and I may just sit in it. After I finish sanding the mind of a cranberry. And doing the dishes and taking out the garbage and gazing at the spectacle before me a ten-foot-tall clarinet summoning the angels with a sonata in e minor. I’m branching out. I’m putting down roots. I’m running to the indicative to stop the breakage of stems. I’m knitting a speckle with a Heckel bassoon.

The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and hot chocolate. One million earths could fit inside the sun. But try to put that in the overhead compartment. If we put consciousness in a box the result is often imprecise. Consciousness has a tendency to raise the dead. It can get a little edgy. It’s why I like to permit things. It gives me the illusion of control. I authorize the tin man to dance like Fred Astaire. And he does, bringing forth pandemonium negative space and winter. Everybody has to jump over an abyss at some point. I play Blueberry Hill on a peach harmonica. And a minute later I get a call from Mick Jagger. He will give a million dollars to never play the peach harmonica again. But I can’t help it. I can’t hold out. It’s got to be done. It’s got to be said. Life is weird among the dead. Sing the dead. All the way from Saturn. Which smells of amaretto.

It’s time to go home now. This is where the pedal meets the metal. Everything hurts like a gospel. King Kong breaks his chains and leaps from the stage. It was meant to be. Tear up Montmartre do what tear up time tear up space rip it up rip it all up. The poem never finds the right angry vapors to make the air feel stupid. And the clouds are mostly picnic areas and spoons. I fooled you world. I’m still listening to the Doors. Weird scenes in the gold mine. I wish I’d written that. Before AI gobbles it up. And spits it out in a university classroom. I’m lost. Lost in space. You can find it through wandering. Liberation. Salvation. Absolution. And then lose it again. And go looking for it again. In a different place. And a different time. And a different body. And a different set of circumstances. The light sweetens at the end, regardless of the tune.