The Morning News

I stood in a room of parachutes, falling through a hole in one of my better moods. A naked blue maneuvered the sky. I handed all my subtleties over to a deviation of faculties, hoping for a parallel to confetti. I was called the detective of thwack. I solved cases of missing content. Tonight was a doozey. I arrived palpable and scratched with literal basilicas. There’s a tacit understanding that snobbism is just a shorthand for xenophobia. The oaths we perturb with our dance are not the ones we try to appease with our history. Those are dealt with later, and are still under development at Warner Brothers. You can probably hear the sound of cylinders thrumming up and down. This is called an enharmonic shift and is just another metaphor used as an impetus for virility and wit. I sure wish I had some. I had a wound once took eighteen stitches just to renew this life. Doctors are serious people. And yet most diseases are absurd.

We miss our former glory. The present is tempting, but the future is coming at us from all sides. I got a tattoo that says "playing against the bombs.” It’s surrounded by a utopia. Don’t kid yourself. Utopias are dangerous. Utopias are dystopias minus the candor. Ever see a glooby mop? That’s how I used to shake the dissociation of self out of myself, and go silly providing myself with turgid winks and ocarinas. Subjectivity describes a person’s grip on what is acting on them. Objectivity is what hovers over our blood at night, bald, autonomous, and tactless. It is through an indispensable fold in the space-time continuum that we can enact our cause with marionettes, à la Raymond Roussel. Everything in it leans on action, and smears the walls with its endless implications. Language is all about substitution, the morning news in the breath of a rose. One thing leads to another, and is therefore angular and bristling with ersatz propellers.

But enough: you are there reading this, and I write things down as they come, so for the moment, things hang, madcap and parasitical. I see a wedge of prospect brimming with desire. Fuck the slush. Pull it out of your complexities, which is what they’re for, putting a treadle on the grindstone and building a milking stand for the goat. It's not always the tumble that develops one's bedside manner but the bubbles goaded into galaxies with a single breath. As soon as I set the dish soap bottle down they pop right out of it. I can hear Shakespeare in the background, talking late with the lead actor of Hamlet. He sounds like a detective. Determined and circumspect. Existence is a scrambled business, one minute all twinkly and appliqué, the next minute cannons and howling banshees. It’s a good art gives in when things aren’t solid in the head. Control can get in the way of sweetmeat. Uneducate yourself first. From there it’s not really what’s in the hand, but the tone that makes things squeeze the hell out of existence.

What I’m kicking around is this notion: a cry, a scent of Cézanne, can say so much about a spine and its many intricacies. What makes you stand. What makes you get up in the morning. What gives you meaning and purpose. Your hat, for example. Organized education is a duck. It just waddles around from panel to podium, from podium to panel, and that’s straight crazy, is it not? Personally, for me it’s all about blackboards. I love blackboards. The sound of chalk. Diagrammed sentences. Quantum equations. Powerfully solid if useless abstractions. Mesopotamian art in cylinder seals of the Pierpont Morgan Library. What happens to us from all the other things going on, in other words. It kills me. That such things are made of it, that a simple wince can deepen into a gun, and shoot a pillow’s feathers into the air, making an image.

I started out in life naked and I’m 100% naked at all times under my clothes. I’m old now, though, so I’m careful when I remove them. Darkness is a friend to the stigmata we bear. That day in Perpignan we boarded our train at two in the afternoon had nothing to do with it. It’s like I’m old King Shit again ruling over a realm of everlasting magenta. Luxury is for the idle rich. It’s inseparable from the will to exclude. Or put it this way: the will to cohere is seminal to the play of ligaments holding the bones together. Erotica, as a consequence, invites talking over the fence. That something is broken is quite obvious. What’s not so obvious is the necessity to hold tight to whatever mast you can find, and not get swept over the gunnels. Under it all, working invisibly, electromagnetic forces, the old patterns give space its grit. A fountain, from four blocks away, can look like ice. And sometimes is ice. Like that fountain froze in the courtyard of the old high school turned into condominiums. Fountains and waterfalls. How does a waterfall freeze? It’s like some kind of warning, mad bride of the ineffable, gorgeous in her gown of ice.