Gertrude Stein Is Making Breakfast

Some things need emphasis. Mahler’s 5^th Symphony. The seashore. Any seashore. They’re all magic. We’re all on a divide between the sea and the land. Life and death. And all those islands in between. Swaying palms. They require no accentuation. The mood resides somewhere between gray and ruby. There’s a seamlessness to some moments that happen in taxis. The sudden, unexpected kiss. They wordless exchange between two gazes. A ghost from the past with a gem-encrusted grimoire on their lap. A circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Seamlessness is ceaseless. It can happen anywhere. And you won’t even know it. Because it’s seamless. Hammers are inherently emphatic. It's part of their structure. Even when they’re lying still they seem to be doing something. Reverie is different. It’s not a hammer at all. It’s more like a parade float. Or a silk shirt with tender buttons. It’s a version of living in which the bulbs are multicolored and Gertrude Stein is making breakfast.

The wiring unfolds the greenhouse with literal symmetry. This is a realm in which symmetry might also be metaphorical. But today it’s literal. And by that, I mean to damage some consonants among the distortions. Just to illustrate what a supposition can do to a pumpkin. The illuminations are boiling out of a jug of cacophonous phenomena. Even the adjectives thud when they hit the floor. That’s how volatile everything is in the laboratory today. You can’t say a word without emanating an eerie blue light. I've been waving semaphores all day in the kitchen window. I become irritatingly stiff among the circles. These attempts at communication have all been rendered flat by the simulacrum. Tonight at the Club Silencio the ghost of Buddy Holly will be singing “That’ll Be the Day.” I don’t know what any of it means. Which, of course, makes it all the more meaningful. Anyone who enjoys miniature golf as much as I do should probably fold themselves into a tumbleweed and roll away. We were happy because it is parliamentary to be happy, not because the shoot went berserk when Cher got on stage. I shattered myself eating spaghetti by virtue of a mouth gone rogue. It left quite a mess. Although the penmanship was remarkably good.

I forget how eyes work. I know light is involved. And roads and emergencies and blood. Passion tempered in fire. Early morning light crawling across a tidepool. The retina is explained by birds. The iris circles the dilation of a cave. Everything in the head is either a shadow or a fire. When thoughts burn down, they create a religion. Darkness laminates the sandstone arching over a bed of tarantulas. When I say eye I mean eye am eye who are U? Everything that enters through the eyes is upside down. Because the eye's lens is convex, it inverts the image; the top of anything hits the bottom of the retina, and light from the bottom of anything hits the top, sparking revolutions and marriage proposals. If you have a quandary reading bank drafts and legal documents, you should see a shaman. Those luminous blobs you see when the lids are closed are called phosphenes. And when the lids open details increase and seagulls hover the landfill. Sparkly women do somersaults on high wires and somewhere in Kansas the James Gang stop the train. Frank recites lines from Shakespeare while Jesse collects money and jewelry. Meanwhile, it's two o’clock, October 19^th, 2025, in Duluth, Minnesota. A calamity of opinions is erupting in everyone’s head as an ophthalmologist prepares to put a needle through Calliope’s left eye…

It’s not what a possibility can do when it’s impossible to do otherwise, it’s what a thermometer can do with an afternoon of churned bitumen. That’s it in a nutshell. The Big Enigma. The Grand Howdy Do. Natural Drift. Holy Moly. Oysters Rockefeller. Banzai Pipeline. I slammed the buttons on my shirt and it made me insoluble. After that, everything seemed like an opium dream. I slumped forward like a shopping bag as hallucinations played around with stones and shadows. My senses hemorrhaged Luxembourg. I voted for people I’d never heard of. Evangelists convulsed on the floor. I wore cotton in my sleep and denim in my dreams. I waxed my panic with shoe polish and the work was good. I felt alive and almond and aloe verra. I embellished my instincts with myths. Dragonflies dangled from my earlobes. Ladybugs flashed in my eyebrows. And man, what eyebrows. All tentacles and wires. It happens. Time. Death. Critical mass. The constant revolution of events in any random barrel. One day you’re studying for the bar. And the next, you’re in a pirogue on the Amazon, paddling toward a fulfillment center.