The New Antipathy

The new antipathy was a clean hypothesis. It was an operation propelled by participle. It had nothing to do with broccoli. This was about luminosity. The tumble of photons about a sewing kit. It had the flavor of anger seasoned with a little disrespect. I could feel the heft of its implications in every word. Imagine two detectives backing away from a radioactive predicate. They move cautiously, so as not to disturb the circumstance of its combustion, this spondee of pickled helium. Poetry is the cesium of capitalism. We’ve known that all along. And yet the old paddle wheelers continued going up and down the rivers. And a pesky little particle intractable to grammatical analysis exploded into an eyeball. A pretty one, with an iris the color of exoneration. Each time I feel swelling in my ankles I know that I'm about to try and explain something that I don't fully understand myself. I don’t even know what it is yet. Whether it’s a substance, a proverb, or a feeling new to this form, a radical new manifestation of beauty as light as gravity and violent as a thermostat. Truth is, I just don’t understand anything anymore. Not even jock itch. My line of work never required an office. But it did require beams of light intermingling with one another like words in a tugboat. I had to do something, or the whole virtue of the thing, the principle, you might even call it an appliance, a dishwasher or iron, would evaporate in wire. This wouldn’t be the first time my intentions became overly ambitious and spread its lather leeward, in the direction of Steamboat Springs. Hesitations can hesitate for so long they become sensations, semaphores on a flightdeck. If you’re going to land, land now. It’s time our feet felt something other than mountains. I’ve been swinging back and forth on a trapeze all day, looking down at all that sawdust, all those rash decisions and warm embraces wrestled to the ground like escalators. I want to get down and walk the ground again, like a real narrative, with eggnog skulls and long secluded strolls along the coast of a thrashing indecision.

What I’d like right now is a bubbly metamorphosis. I feel ready for something. Not sure what. Something with wings. Something slithery and supple and preposterous. My hammer glows amidst the many mental calls to my gut. Much of life is like that. Shoegaze. Kabuki. A guitar can alter one's sense of being. You can stand on a stage in front of a million people and still feel upside down. Employment is the monotony that usurps our expansion. Experience is the barracuda that echoes our scope. Aching is the stir that institutes our reach. Instinct is the syntax that spangles our luxuries. Then there’s the really naïve hope that a postage stamp can carry the weight of my mind to a wet sweater in Lowell. Like the old days. When Emily Dickinson rode a Harley up and own the streets of Amherst. Now we have bandwidth. Minds tethered to security issues. I remember owning a baseball glove once, but that’s as far as I got to understanding Jung, and the vital importance of third base. Until I solve the problem of how to get the energy of a man – me – into narrative, this will have lost its relevance, and I’ll sit here as usual, taking in the Stones, reminiscing, scribbling, stirring some form of soup, entwining a frayed mythology, thinking hard about the future, the one I left behind in 1976, on the freeway to California.

Don't let yourself be carried away by superficial reactions to a dark thought. Explore it as you would an underworld. There are things there that can fulfil or kill a grammar with a single mushroom. The key property is movement. The convergence of hands on a sticky substance. A kneecap embodies the fulcrum of ingenuity among the strippers. It’s all so meridional. I think of Napolean strolling the shores of Saint Helena. Euclid drawing shapes on scrolls of papyrus. Morning in the throat of a paradox. Words born from a luminous consciousness. Tumbling down the spine of a paragraph. Stumbling around in a slippery metaphor. This glitter of drug nebula in my balcony headlights is entirely salsa. Winter is the perfect time for rides in competitive forklifts. I heat by generating incidents as toward happens. The warp finger is insoluble below the fullness of your antifreeze. Think of it as an ear eating a toccata sandwich. A conquest by sudden crease of the sugar pronouns. I dwell in the yell of a reach to think it. I have fenced off the personality house for everyone's safety. The time of nutmeg is here. There are signs in the men’s room. Life is preoccupation with itself. Get used to habits. Make use of them. Lift what you value into a Technicolor future. Pedal to the metal. Merge with oncoming traffic.

Now, here’s the kick. I write this stuff for no particular reason. I spill my brains without incident not because it makes me happy but because I’m against the restraints of seclusion. I can feel myself drifting out to sea a little more each day. The horizon is dripping with thought. Clouds veined with lightning. Things are beginning to seesaw. I like dealing with these things straight on, like Dostoyevski. Meditating on the universe with the look of bad intent is bound to create a disturbance. It makes people nervous. The Zoo was one of the bars that lets you know the instant you walk in nobody here is interested in your aspirations. All they want is your utter indifference. The guts are a poor source of moss. Nobody fondles their shield. They clench it. I am more fucked with the devious than the genial. The genial are everywhere they know is there because it’s there not because it’s whispered into the ear like a secret. We have no secrets. Secrets age in old age. They become strains of old melody. And die in the drafts at the airport.