Somewhere In Phoenix

I fostered a taproot and it smashed into Cubism. It's my way of saying the moon is an umbrella and it takes a discriminating eye to see what a brush with string might bring to the stringless in a world of pulleys. No pallet is against itself in the realm of dots. Sensory details are important tools for lingering in bed on a Sunday morning. Speed paints a distance differently than a voluptuous inertia. I always think to myself, we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we? Is that what you think? I think the combinations we float require a lot of soap. I can feel it. That old tension. The pull of heaven. Two thousand light years from the nearest MacDonalds. A phonograph next to him, an artist's thumb presses a blob of cobalt blue into a blob of Tuscan red. And a feeling seizes hold of my baggage. Packing has long been one of my more reliable talents. There’s a trick to it. The truth is never naked. It’s an inner journey I experience through a pack of lies.

Until it became an incessant babbling of swans, the sailing here was circular, and full of decorations. It stands to reason. Consciousness is my favorite bistro. I anticipate the meaning of an entire generation to walk through that door any minute and sit down in the next sentence. But no go. Didn’t happen. I often expect too much of words. They can only do so much. It would mean a great deal if a twig were plucked and carved into a waterfall. I think it would prove something. What, I don’t know. I wish Samuel Beckett were still alive. Ponder this device, if you will, and see if it means anything. A communion, a book of hymns, or a particle accelerator with a ring of superconducting magnets. The wound is large that panics my quarks into beatitude. There are those who turn to drawing as a way to forget the pain. Others turn to knitting. The resilience that it cultivates through its practices is fragile, but persistent. It’s my chief prerogative to dilate when nothing else is happening. The rest of these words are for floating in space.

I squeeze a predicate with a rhythm and a velocity lets loose. The movement is fluid in contrast to the surrounding frenzy. I write my diagnosis with a cactus needle. Human evolution has gone awry. What were you hoping to hear? That a sigh in the folds of a dress cradles fire? There are so many sequins hidden under the stage costumes I can’t always be sure what constitutes a genuine excitement and what makes a good homily. The specific context surrounding our interactions was translatable as a box of candy. I knew it was a friendly message because it was pinned to my glucose. Anyone who fathoms the calamity that lies concealed in the absurd guilelessness and blind confidence of technocratic solutions suffers from an anxiety that is past all comparisons. Because we know all too precisely what it takes to build an understanding based on warm water and a thrilling, irresistible rationale, accompanied by a perfectly good conscience. That is why the spoon rebels against the scoundrel. And the tines of a fork are helpless in a bowl of soup.

Somewhere in Phoenix is a Spiritus-Sancti: the Holy Grail of houseplants. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. I’ve been hearing a lot of strange things lately. Spiritus-Sancti is a rare philodendron. And it’s a rare daisy that can tie the sun in a knot and cough up Houdini. I borrowed Bob Dylan for the weekend. He’s 84 and spry as a bowl of Rice Krispies. There’s no reason that our former passions and aspirations should fade from resonance. The hills are alive with the sound of hives. Bells in the mountains, buckles in everyone’s belt. Credulity often comes packaged in doubt. Might I persuade you that when my propagation twangs my G string trembles? If you’re alive you should wear your age like a discipline. And if you find yourself for something you’re automatically against something. Therefore, let’s be rebels together. Or at least roommates who agree on one thing and one thing only: the house is on fire. Gray days such as these are perfect for unintentional situations. If you’re old enough to remember Lulu’s rendition of “Shout,” you’re old enough to remember what it was once like to enter a bookstore as if it were the Louvre, or drop a needle onto Blonde and Blonde, and find it full of shotgun deviations instead of bytes and algorithms. I feel it, too. Metamorphism is for the dissatisfied, the dreamers and malcontents. Madame Bovary frantically doomscrolling on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. And admiring the display that is sunset on Flatbush during the Mermaid Parade.