Bring It To Me

My course is set for an uncharted voyage. I have maps. I have swivels. I have sleeves. I have predicates and mints. I have the power of English, the agility of Swahili, and the gallantry of French. Words are more like tongs. They hover in probability clouds. I plan to captivate the moment and float. Float wherever the currents take me. From the burble of water over the rocks to the hushed murmur of the estuary. That place between heaven and earth where the postpartum of life begins. That place off the highway where the mist tingles on the skin and the waves beat the sand. That place in the distance where the horizon hangs on the revolution of the planet. Full moon in a ring of noctilucent clouds. Is being dead the ultimate high? Being dead means being dead. Whatever being dead is. There’s no ‘is’ about it. Is is a stative verb. Is is a state of being. It is what it is. Bring it to me. Bring your sweet loving. Bring it on home to me.

The book is a spiritual instrument. It flaps across the room dropping clay tablets, cuneiform ordeals performed in the underworld. It has sentences in it that crawl across the page by secreting a layer of mucus and contracting vowels on the underside of their insistence by inducing in the mind of the reader a wave-like motion, propelling them forward, sentence and reader, arriving God knows where. Palermo, maybe, or a state of mind, a cognitive Palermo, a cat on the patio. Milwaukee. A used bookstore. Minneapolis. Another used bookstore. Used bookstores have become the tombs of a literary culture that began with ancient Sumer and ended in a social media platform. Things are implicit in books which means that Vivaldi composed Concerto No. 10 in B minor for 4 violins in a tacit, unspoken look in the eyes of a female violinist, which were arousing in an understood swoon of sensuality grasping at beauty in the milieu of a book.

I can bring you to a moment of great formulation if you’re willing to ride along on the propositions of words. Relax. I’m not carrying a gun. But I can feel a wave coming. I have its coordinates in my valise. The charm of mutability is in the glaze of the arbitrary. If you follow these emissions to their speculative conclusion fold the paper into an origami duck and watch it waddle across the table uttering lines from Finnegans Wake. The horizontal is a vertical butter and the vertical is hysterical and slate. Things are what they are because they exist on a license plate of epistemological combustion causing the thumb and index finger to turn the page to see what happens to things when they get written down and described with exotic adjectives and worrying prepositions arranged according to a fever of Möbius loops and unfamiliar machinery. Rebecca del Rio in that David Lynch series Twin Peaks season 3. No stars. A mournful legato. I get a charge out of blossomings of burning perception. Thing I held once, wet and trembling and glowing from the inside in a rage of ruby dispersion. I will rise and go now. And go to Innisfree.

Horizons are like a big Zen joke. They keep moving ahead as one approaches them. You cannot attain a horizon. It has no real existence. It’s a line in the far distance of the ocean where the surface of the ocean blends naturally into the sky and so by extension implies the same tandem connection between life and death, that tenuous zone between the open country and that wide open majestical roof fretted with golden fire we call a sky. There’s no real division there. These aren’t opposites, either. Their split is actually a fusion. And really mysterious and haunting and exciting and scary. The horizon is a hot summons to elsewhere. I could stare at it for hours. Which I did, several afternoons in Kauai. And once in Nevada, on Interstate 80 to Reno on a long, unending alkali desert and above the biggest damn sky I’ve ever seen, an infinite pale blue, stupendously different from a night filled with stars. This was a color so spooky in its implacable neutrality that the only thing that kept me somehow tethered to earth was the doleful voice of Willie Nelson singing Red Headed Stranger on the tape player. This was in the 80s. The “Good Morning America” 80s. Lennon dead. Reagan grinning. Money detached from gold and launched into digital psychosis. Everything turns around. Maybe this will too. Pivot into something indigestible to the cells of the human brain. Funny and sad like a big Zen joke.

If you can imagine a shy stampede in timid grass, perhaps I can show you a fragment of the hole in my head. And if the prospect of that doesn’t interest you, the texture of my arm has a strange color. That’s right. I’m an extraterrestrial. I arrived here in the womb of a wombat. I was awakened by flash lightning on a hot humid night in August. My morphology confused people. I was told I resembled an iguana. My neighbor recommended I watch Night of the Iguana. It was during the scene in which Richard Burton walks barefoot over broken glass to the astonishment of the young and beautiful Sue Lyon that I knew I wasn’t made for life on this planet. My survival depended on whatever gifts or aptitude I could discover within myself. I was impressed with Cyril Delevanti’s role as the poet Nonno. He had a certain dignity and stamina for enduring the madness of the human dominion I found inspiring. Maybe I could be a poet. After practicing daily for one month, I learned how to make some maneuvers with my hands and hypnotize myself instantly. When consciousness becomes words it becomes harder to find. Because it turns into words. Until it became words it was a soft thing full of patterns. Now it's a skull dripping rubies in a motorcycle repair shop. Nonno rumbles off on a Harley Breakout. The rest is silence.