A Play Of Mind

I have nothing pinned to my forehead. It may seem that way, because the bump there is quite conspicuous. I don't know how it got there. But a few days later, I will see the beginning of a horn. A rhinoceros horn, to be precise. I had been warned that such a thing could happen. There was a lot of that going around. People were turning into rhinoceroses. There had even been a play about it. Warning people. You might become a rhinoceros. Symptoms included a morbid compulsion to agree with everything ratified by a central authority. It was worse than Covid. Masks were of little avail. They called it a pandemic. And then it became normal.

Me? I’m a poet. I’m equipped to do anything. Except make money. Or build a sauna. Or split the atom. Or serve caviar at a multibillionaire’s wedding. Calling oneself a poet is a very odd thing to do these days. I prefer to keep the whole thing quiet. It's like having something scandalous in your past, three years in San Quentin for armed robbery, or fraud, or years in rehab recovering from an embarrassing addiction. When, in fact, the addiction is poetry. And literature is dying. Ok. Enough of that. How about you? What’s going on in your circus? Please don’t say bitcoin. I apologize for the judgments. If I’m overly pellucid at times, it’s not you, it’s the billboards. They seem sad, and anachronistic. Like the Yellow Pages. I loved the Yellow Pages. No robots with whom to argue before you can talk to a human. I’m Ice Age. I’m not built for apps. In my day, you decompressed in a bar, or a tavern, and went home in a fog of philosophy and stupefaction. The seedier bars had a weird glamour. And the air held different omens. Potential was the color of propane, and it welded incongruities into airships for a rescue mission in the impending zombie apocalypse.   

I don’t know. I think I could build a sauna. Given the right tools. Some easy-to-read instructions. With beautiful, multi-colored illustrations. A warm room. With lots of space. And a big couch. A really seasoned davenport. With wine stains and loose change and popcorn under the cushions. Or rather, say, a workshop, like the one might dad always had. It was wherever we went, like he carried it in his back pocket, ban saw, table saw, pipe clamps, chisels, jig saw. It had different smells. Paint. Turpentine. Sawdust. The sawdust was ubiquitous. Given those circumstances I might be tempted to build a sauna. But do I need a sauna? Do I want a sauna? I don’t even know how it came up. What put sauna in my head? What puts anything in my head? Besides poetry. And propaganda. Poetry is the propaganda seeping into our lives from another dimension.

I like examples of things. If someone tells me there is a spoon that can bend the mind, I find it credible, and have no difficulty believing it. Anyone who has had a scoop of ice cream has felt a spoon bend their mind. But if someone tells me that objectivity is nothing but a play of the mind, I will ask for their credentials, and ask to see an example. If I’m told that 1 + 1 equals two, I will ask, where is the mind in all this? They may tell me that one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception. It’s the play of a mind that shows whether a mind is there at all. And I’ll answer ok, sure. What’s the next perception? Where is it? And if they hand me a ticket to purgatory, I will consider the possibility of being punked. And because the mind is sister to the brother of amusement park rides, I will go about things pell-mell. And right here, where the next sentence is to be born, I will find another perception. Right there, in those swift currents of syllables we call a brassiere. Nothing but frills and nonsense. Imagine a postage stamp that is pure thought. Pure thought with glue on the back. I think it is in this sense, this particular glimpse, this extraordinary percept, that we will find what we’re looking for. A play of mind. Right here. Where the work comes in, setting up chairs, making coffee, and mumbling lines from Hamlet.