If Your Money Is So Plump Why Can't You Buy A Hoe?

 If your money is so plump why can’t you buy a hoe?

Nobody’s ever asked me that.

Umber embodies a certain maturity. The raw sienna has its own physiology. The colors I feel tonight are entwined in waves of pink and black. Extravagances move through my sleep eating perspectives and eyeballs. The whole idea of painting enriches the spirit. The smell of turpentine will begin to dog your heels. Every room in your house will have a view of the fence. This, I hope, will help us attain a deeper intimacy. Not the fence, per se, but the hole in the fence. The forms surrounding our afternoon. The stamina to play bingo at age 102. The bumps in the road. The considerations to consider. The hunger that keeps knocking on your door. Starlings, rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. The narrative that I keep trying to fend off in this paragraph. But it keeps coming. The one about starlings. Rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. I already said that. But I’ll say it again. Rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky.

all my poetry is misbehaved

it never does what I want it to do

i’m not asking much

all i ask is that it rid the world of fascism

and provide me with a few wildly extravagant nights

in Ibiza

or the rotating dining room

in Nero’s Golden House 68 AD

this is precisely what I mean

by the poem misbehaving

i said nothing about wealth and yet

the poem decided to be decadent and wealthy

it took me for a ride

i had no choice

because it will soon be a tree

in Redwood National Park

where I can’t arrest its development

i can only go along

and stub my toe

on a piece of conscience 

Was there ever a prettier song than Roy Orbison singing "Pretty Woman"? How would people react to it now? I don’t think it would go well. It wouldn’t be pretty. Next to that, in the story, the one I’m telling about pretty women, there's something that reeks of blatant impropriety. As soon as I identify its true nature, its full dimensions and temperature, I may notice that spring is missing and the worms are unhappy, and this will have a powerful effect on me. I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree. I will be your being, I will be your yesterday and today, I will bounce around your house with easy solutions.

Life ends quickly. Or so it seems. Because it doesn't really. If I take out my telescope and peer into the past, I see swearing and laughter. I see peonies, anemones and hydrangeas in fluted glass. I hear a woman biting into a crust of bread in Marseille. I see clouds out of the window of a passenger jet. I see a man come out of the sound in SCUBA gear. I see people at conferences. I see people turning into rhinoceroses. I see nipples and harpsichords. I see liquids and rocks and old dirt roads. I see people whistling and hugging one another. I see a ball get thrown. I hear cheering. And wonder what it’s like to be a billionaire. It’s inconceivable. Not just the money. The many things I can’t even think of. The disasters caused by letting my desires go wild. And the impoverishment of spirit. For which I do not have words. But I do have the receipts.

i believe that feeling can be expanded

to include honesty

which is far more entertaining

than chemistry

as it spills itself

all over the 21^st century

reality is mostly ice

but some of it comes packaged

as new underwear

i’m going to take a deep breath now

and inflate myself with 900 lbs. of nitrous oxide

and arrange my speech accordingly

on the shores of Miami

you should never think of yourself as old

an angel told me that

everything is a naked mind

climbing the high temples of Angkor Wat

and pops like a bubble

at the top

where all the monkeys are chattering

about the poem that came to town

wearing nothing but a universe

and the words it came in 

If I ever call you a conspiracy theorist, it’s not an insult. It’s a compliment. Nobody should be shamed for having suspicions. For critical thinking. For introspection. For circumspection. For insurrection. Logic isn’t always such a bad thing. I don’t like to see it intrude on poetry. It has no place in poetry. But I do like to see it shatter arguments. Facts used to be quite handy. If you got them right. And you could remember them in a heated moment of arrogance and condescension. But now we’re in the dark ages and facts count for very little. Money decides everything. Money gets everything wrong. But they keep printing it. And devaluing it. And exchanging it for gold. And favors. And persuasion. And this is a fact. Based on nothing. Just fiat. Trust. And debt.

Meanwhile, while we’re all still learning about how to inhabit this planet, things are going to hell in a handbasket.

We need art. More art then ever before. Any art. You can make art out of anything. Softeners, ocean swells, sanitary napkins, gyrating drowsy dividends, implausible presumptions, the ovaries of the hellebore, apparitions ripped apart by logic, postpartum starling histories, Led Zeppelin souvenirs, feathery wet dreams, beautiful resentments, football pottery, grievous effigies of ice sculpture, anything with pale narrow leaves. You name it. It’s yours. It’ll follow you around. And wonder what you’re doing. And that’s art. That’s what it does. It counterfeits rocks. And wears argyle socks. Dictates flippancy. Parachutes into your darkness and shines like duende.

I’ve got a feeling deep inside. Think I’ll call it luggage. And hope it gets lost in Bora Bora.

It’s time to start the Renaissance. These dark times are a drag. I don’t know what to think of humanity. I don’t know up from down. I don’t know what I don’t know. And that’s a good thing.

The most thought-provoking thing is that we are still not thinking, said Martin Heidegger. What do you think? I think I’m thinking but maybe I’m not maybe I’m really just dreaming I’m thinking.

As soon as things get metaphysical, let’s get an Uber and ride around Paris all night.

My song is a gingerbread cartoon on an axle of crazy wheels.

they say the west and the east will never meet

that’s not true they met one night

on the outskirts of Perpignan

dogs kept them awake all night

so they went south

then they went north

then they went southwest

then they went northeast

then they got lost

in details and created a brave new world

of rags and exasperation

and this is how the search for consciousness

can look blank as hell

on a sheet of paper

it takes stamina

to strangle a remorse

but who cares

if all the metaphors smell of romance

and finally bloom

in the light of the sun

Think of a poem as a clamor or a hug or a hip and often it will hold you hard and during the growing distance that is in its power it will glow in you like the speech of the peacock king. There's always a way to do things with iron, but I recommend a cup of coffee, eggs benedict, and a table with a good view of the highway. You can’t remove a windshield without a little effort. But why would you want to do that anyway? A gerund is born through cabbage one day on the fields of suggestion. It doesn’t happen by paint. It happens by assembling a gluttony and eating Thursday until the world turns gregarious so you can start there. I’ll get dressed and join you. Heidegger’s hammer is a famous philosophical everyday activity. So we'll need lots of nails and tales and forests. Sometimes you just get the urge to build something. It’s instinctive. Like running behind a chair when an elf jumps into your soup extolling the virtues of spontaneity. Sometimes you just know what to avoid, what to seek, what to extol, and what to say when someone asks you what you do for a living. Tell them you feel concentric. And roll away.

 

The Energy Of Despair: Ecopoetics In The Work Of Michel Deguy

The best way to combat fascism is to expand one's vocabulary. I agree with Wittgenstein: The limits of my language are the limits of my world. I have never understood the tendency in the American mindset to reduce a given situation or experience to its most basic terms. I suspect it has something to do with the insanely disproportionate obsession with profit and survival at the expense of consciousness and thought. The current anti-intellectual trend among right-wing populists and the Woke left reflects this, and is, in large measure, what has led to this current flare-up of fascism. It’s always been there. Poetry, especially its wilder manifestations in poets like Emily Dickinson, Clark Coolidge and Gertrude Stein, exists as a highly effective antidote. It’s a strong intoxicant with the paradoxical effect of counteracting the inherent toxins of capitalism. To intoxicate means to induce a toxin; poetry is an anti-toxin toxin. It would be a mistake to cite Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” in one’s resumé. Unless, of course, you were applying for a job as wilderness guide in the annals of surrealism or Finnegans Wake.

In some of the more intellectual quarters poetry occupies a status similar to the mindfulness movement and meditation retreats which cater to the wealthier sector of the western demographic. It excludes working class populations saddled with long working hours and little – if any – leisure for developing one’s more spiritual appetites.

According to Heidegger, we’re all homeless. We’re thrown into this world – into existence – with little understanding of what we’re doing here. In his Hölderlin lectures, Heidegger describes our dilemma as a fundamental ontological struggle between authentic existence and falling into a trance-like state of inauthentic debasement, of social superficialities and soul-deadening routines. Authentic existence requires an awakened acceptance of our mortality, of taking ownership of our life and choosing to cultivate and pursue our own possibilities rather than conform to the everydayness of the herd mentality. An ethos quite similar to this was prominent in the 60s. Not surprisingly, the 60s was also a time of tremendous creativity. Some reports indicate that Heidegger was sympathetic to the movements during the 60s, though it would be a mistake to assume any substantial linkage. That said, the break from societal conventions was quite dramatic, and lingered in a decidedly more diluted form throughout the 70s. There was a dramatic pivot toward consumerism in the 80s during the emergence of Reagan and Thatcher and neoliberal economics; the 60s became trivialized as a time of frivolity and little else, its psychedelic pathfinders such as Alan Watts and Timothy Leary mocked in sitcoms like Taxi in characters like the drug-addled Jim Ignatowski, played by Christopher Lloyd.

The situation is far worse now. The zeitgeist has completely and resolutely gone in the direction of market-driven profiteering and grueling work schedules with very little margin left for spiritual development, except among the very wealthy, tech oligarchs and corporate overlords of the financial industry and asset management sector. They favor high end spiritual retreats such as Ananda in the Himalayas and Golden Door in California, a highly exclusive, $10,000-per-week, Japanese-inspired spa beloved by CEOs and celebrities.

To inhabit the world poetically has become a spa cliché, remarked the late French poet Michel Deguy in a podcast interview about the practice of poetry and – more specifically -  Friedrich Holderlin’s exhortation to inhabit the world poetically. Deguy cautions that the full meaning of this words has been cheapened by marketing ploys designed to lure bobo money into the coffers of the wellness industry and corporate training centers. Commercialization has tarnished its initial luster. It now sounds like a glib bromide coopted by the bourgeoisie. Our ecological situation is far more grave. Capitalism, along with its evil bride colonialism, has so polluted, exploited, vulgarized and subjugated the world that the sublimity once sought by the romantics has been trashed beyond recognition, crushed by the juggernaut of consumerism and pissed on by tech giants. Intervention is crucial, and it must be an intervention of the poetic spirit, a transcendent imaginative force immune to the seductions of capitalism, and powerful enough to blow a hole in the cybersphere.

The average data center uses 300,00 gallons of water per day, with larger facilities potentially using between 1 million and 5 million gallons daily for cooling purposes. The mountains of plastic and electronic waste contaminating the shores of poorer countries – the former Edens of earthly paradise - with decomposing plastics and harmful chemicals are symptoms of the decrepitude of every virtue that inspires a quality of life higher than the unmanageable obesity of the rich. 

Ergo, Deguy’s ecopoetics has been spawned by a world in crisis and provides an antidote that has more to do with the way we inhabit our lives, inhabit our histories, and inhabit the planet, than the bogus alternatives enriching the coffers of the green movement.

I’m not a champion of the oil industry, but nor am I a champion of windmills, each of which requires an estimated 260–300 tonnes of steel, which requires significant mining, production, and transportation energy. Maintenance involves regular servicing, and in some cases, the use of gear oil and, for some, diesel engines to assist in operation. Windmills last approximately 20 to 30 years, meaning they’re in constant production, burning diesel in transportation and using electricity to manufacture steel, fiberglass, resins, aluminum and copper.

I wish had a dollar for every cable leading to an electric car I’ve nearly tripped over while out running. Are electric cars better for the planet than cars using gasoline? I don’t know. You be the judge. Global lithium production reached roughly 100,000 to 180,000 metric tons recently.

As a poet, I feel that any diatribe or prescription or screed I contribute to the global debate surrounding our planetary crisis will be as effective as throwing paint on the Mona Lisa. To be fair, anything I wrote – however futile its mission – would not be as imbecilic. But the deep feeling of impotence is real. People don’t read much of anything in this current social malaise, much less poetry. And yet here I am, writing out of a sense of crisis. Why? It’s all I’ve got.

“And what are poets for in a destitute time,” asks Hölderlin’s elegy “Bread and Wine.” Hölderlin held a very high position in Heidegger’s philosophy. In his essay “What Are Poets For,” Heidegger provides some answers. We need poets because they resist the technologies of war and exploitation with the technologies of transcendence, the Technicians of the Sacred, to borrow the title of Jerome Rothenberg’s foundational anthology of multicultural poetry. Poets, such as they inhabit the hyper-technological, profit-driven dystopia of the modern world, resist the banalities of the marketplace with a strong sense of duende, a Promethean rebellion against the banalities of the bureaucrat, what Hannah Arendt famously termed the banality of evil. Suffice it to say, this is not an easy path. The cost of living is extremely high, and poetry does not pay well, to say the least. Most poets that I know make a living teaching at universities, which also lend a great deal of support in publications and conferences. Outside academia, it’s another story. Without the institutional visibility of universities, and lack of grants and awards, it’s extremely difficult to grow an audience for one’s work. Which also means very little influence, thereby negating the kind of role Heidegger describes for the poet. It’s a problem. A very big problem.

It’s a slightly different story in France. I was amazed at the number of bookstores in Paris when my wife and I visited in 2013 and 2015. I was also astonished at how many different titles and subjects were offered covering an extremely broad spectrum of ideas and interests.

My wife and I met poet Michel Deguy for coffee one morning in the square of Saint-Sulpice in Paris’s 6^th arrondissement. We sat outside at one of the tables in front of the Café de la Mairie. It was a beautiful, sunny August morning. Michel arrived on a bicycle, smoking a cigarette. He seemed quite cheerful. I waited while he finished his cigarette. When he was done, he tossed it on the ground and said ‘salut,’ with a mischievous grin. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was having me on. ‘Salut,’ which can mean either hello or goodbye, depending on the context, had a far deeper meaning, which I didn’t discover until some years later, while reading an essay by Jacques Derrida focusing on a poem by Michel Deguy called “Apparition of the Name.” Derrida’s essay, titled “How to Name,” explores the bivocality of Salut, which he sees as signifying a salutation and a salvation, an act of maintaining the other as "intact" and inviolable in the present, even as that act is "contaminated" by the inevitable reality of finitude and departure. Which, in this particular situation, we did. We left the poor cigarette to its fate, wisps of smoke fading into non-existence, and found a table outside on the ground near the café.

In an essay devoted to explicating Michel Deguy’s philosophy concerning ecopoetics and the different ways in which it manifests in his poetry - Pensée écopoétique de Michel Deguy - Julia Holter writes: “The poem, for its part, does not define, but it makes us see, crystallizing 'its thought' in an instant. Proceeding metonymically, it shows the ‘whole’ through the particular, the example ‘rises to the paradigm,’ while infinitely extending its enigma. For the poet, this ‘paradigmatic’ vision is a way of life, a mode of dwelling. With ecology, which means the study of oikos, the study of the dwelling place, poetic dwelling acquires a new urgency in Deguy's work, its most radical vector.”

Deguy’s The End of the World (La fin dans la monde), a prose poem in five parts published in 2009, is a work of profound poetic and philosophical reflection, what Deguy calls “philopoetry.” “Neither lamentation nor preaching,” writes Gisèle Berkman in an essay titled “Giving Voice to Infinity” (Donner parole à l'infini), “The End in the World is above all a meditation on the intertwining of finitude and infinity that constitutes our condition, or, if you prefer, that composes our existential structure. The central theme here would be Pascal's famous statement: ‘Man infinitely surpasses man,’ reinterpreted, in a Heideggerian mode, as that which represents the very torsion of Dasein, or the existential weaving of the infinite and the finite. Deguy leads us to consider infinity at the heart of finitude, the distension or internal disjunction of a finitude as if transfixed by infinity. Analysis with an end, analysis without end.” 

The End of the World, Berkman continues, “implicitly confronts the triple Kantian question: what can I know? what should I do? what may I hope for? And that the ‘ongoing mutation’ constitutes a paradigm. What can I know? Nothing other than what the intelligence of the overall process offers me, always to be meditated upon, analyzed, and understood. What should I do? What am I permitted to hope for? Here, the two Kantian questions are intertwined, forming a program of critical resistance, a truly po-ethical one. For it is no longer a matter of hoping, the poet and thinker reiterates, but rather, by relinquishing hope, of implementing the salutary awareness of what has been lost, reviving the active sense of loss in the very places where it occurred. Not ‘to mourn’ (a refrain with which Deguy soberly settles accounts) but to reinscribe what has been lost: ‘To be in mourning so as to never be done with it; neither with it, nor with what it reveals in its tone.’ (Let us mention in passing: The End in the World is also, even if not solely, a book of mourning, reinscribing the names of living, indelible loss, and a book working to metabolize mourning, to actively perpetuate it—the energy of despair.”

Our modern apparatus, or Gestell, Heidegger’s term for the essence of modern technology, has had a sterilizing effect on the human imagination. Deguy sees it as an ongoing mutation carrying us further away from the Logos, the Greek term meaning word, reason, or principle, and which is fundamental to philosophy and theology. In Aristotle’s rhetoric, it refers to persuasion through logic and data, and in Christianity, specifically John’s Gospel, it signifies Jesus Christ as the divine Word made flesh.

So if one asks, what are poets for, this may serve as a partial answer. The poet – fueled by the energy of despair – is an antidote to the juggernaut of computer technology and surveillance eroding our deeper connections to the planet we inhabit with such grotesque negligence, such uncaring ignorance. Of course, you can’t force people against their will to sit in a room listening to a poet’s verbal acrobatics do everything it can to liberate the mind from the technologically conceived panopticon in trajectories of verbal panache. But you can keep trying, you can keep putting it out there. It is this unwavering faith in the logos that presents a path of lucid resistance, the love of thought expressed in poetry, the universe in a swarm of words.

A Touch Of Blue

Is the collapse of the wave function a wicker chair made of ice cream? Consciousness is reverie. This includes Portugal and Spain. There are times I feel friendly and well-disposed, and times when I feel perplexed, stunned, stupefied, and dismayed. Consciousness is never what everyone wants it to be. During its ooze, I find there are spectacular waves that give it heat and Mozart, small but significant differences to unpack, and wear around the home. The universe is exquisite at night, and this is a carnival in my head. The freak show of private eyes and turnstiles scurries about pinching things. The world is palpable, and should be treated as exhilarations for which our biology erects monuments. Something is what it is when it sifts the air for a new decorum. Our language should have a strong affiliation for rivers. And catfish and reeds. In this respect Derrida, as well as philosophy itself, is forever haunted by its airplanes and jewelry.

It was in the solitude of an unsuitable career choice that I became sensitive to certain nuances of verbal expression. Objects turn in the mind like hot dogs in a 7-11 rotisserie. This is my life. It’s also a painting. A woman stands naked in a hotel on the French riviera holding a bath towel gazing at vase of dahlias in a meditative pose. It calms me to look at it. I coax sensations from its surface. And with a tempest of keystrokes, I conjure predicates to dance around me in sequins. And that’s when it hit me: I’m within walking distance of life.

being is everywhere

tent poles make it plausible

we see the sparkle of consciousness

leap back into my brain

when i get up in the morning

but what is it

that makes me think

i can change the world with poetry

when i can’t even tell a good joke

consciousness is exhausting

the average data center

uses 300,00 gallons of water per day

who can keep up with that

it truly is pointless

all of it

can this be taken to mean

that the universe

is just as confused as I am

i think it means nothing

can be solved with an app

i know what to do

i will get a ladder

and lean it against the moon

and climb into Fragonard 

I used to spend hours in a bookstore agonizing over what books I could afford and which I could realistically read within a lifetime. Sometimes I’d pull a book off the shelf and crawl into it wrapped in a bearskin coat. Have you noticed how salt is always in the background? I can tell you one thing. The dead don’t use words. They communicate by salt. Angels float by on Lake Mitigation. Each time I get a feeling I float further into the trees and discover it's hard to believe that such a fragile thing as a snowflake can crash through a window and leave the anxiety of death intact. Here’s what I don’t understand: horses. They’re so intuitive, like poetry. No one can build walls around it and call it a defense mechanism. Or a religion. Everyone needs a meaning attached like a tag on a mattress, which compromises the full weight of your being. Be careful about what you say. People are on edge. An honest feeling will get you into trouble. Can a universe be void of meaning if the waffles look good? I like the way those little square cavities fill with syrup. It just runs off pancakes. But waffles let it soak in. Like the meaning of something. I know it’s there. I can feel it. Everything quivers with something to say, and the there’s a touch of blue in the kitchen window blinds. It’s beautiful. Subtleties such as this are healing. It’s good medicine. Inane thing to say, I know, and I apologize. But there it is. Blue. Obstinately, beautifully blue.

The World Needs Poets

The world needs poets. It just doesn’t know it yet. The world needs poets to plant a rose in every secret garden. A tulip in every balloon, and a quorum in every quintet. All poetry is a form of insemination. But if it’s not, it might also be a fertilizer. Or a blitz. A fast intense campaign to restore croquet to the dunes of Mars. And what are poets for in a destitute time, asks Hölderlin’s elegy Bread and Wine. And I answer with biscotti. I know it’s not much, but my thoughts were bubbly when I thought of this, and my theories have been patched with exultation, rather than a tube of hubbub, which is sticky, and oozes forth with the grace and eloquence of all things elaborate and gooey. I have many theories. They’re ardent, like a harmonica, and hard to play. The court of opinion has been braced with a hope that it one day might do justice to itself, and cause all hell to break loose. And we all know what that means. It means the world needs poets.

To each of us something personal is granted. In my case, it’s personal. And by that I mean, really personal. So personal as to almost be impersonal. Like a pillowcase, or a snowshoe. When Heidegger uses the word draft, he means an evolving, or preparatory working out of a complex idea, rather than a final, dramatic crowbar. When I hear the word draft, I think of something to avoid at all costs. I also think of a big cold glass of bubbliness, as sunlight in a draft of beer. It is here, in this moment, right now, projecting itself into possibilities, the way air hardens into words, ingots of meaning, the way thoughts drift through the mind, haunting all the fauna and flora with memories of summer, and getting naked with a girl among the reeds on the banks of the Mississippi. Of course, not everything is a violin I can turn into dandruff. I still need skin and provocation. Every word should haunt the expectation of its being here, and then squeeze you hard with a naked and tender sincerity. This is what makes it circulate among the hammers, and cause mayhem to build a house, and live in happy squalor, inventing philosophies and hats.

Music is patterned sound. So they say. It’s a negotiable medium, like the headwaters of the subjective, the place where bone and spirit meet. Music can take you elsewhere. But you have to meet it half way. You can beat a drum, blow on a horn, or use a purposeful self-assertion in ways that are disproportionate to the starkness of the décor, and create new worlds, new patterns. Language produces and reproduces itself, and is a form of music, since it whirls around in the ears like wind through Louisiana cypress, and brings things into the light of understanding. Do emotions have shapes? Of course they do. I see the architecture of time as a sky full of starlings, rolling and billowing and swaying in the sky. Mozart had a starling he bought in Vienna after hearing it whistle a variation of a theme he had composed just weeks earlier. The bird altered the theme by singing a G sharp instead of a G natural, which delighted Mozart. Grace is exhilarating. And when there is grace in music, and grace in language, the spirit rises to the occasion. We step away quietly from the necrosis of politics, and stand on the porch, and listen to the rain.

We are the bees of the invisible. Declared Rilke. “We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up on the great golden beehive of the Invisible.” It’s intangible there where the glow extends beyond itself and becomes a portrait of time. If I steer my forehead west, there’s a hinge for the door and a knob to make it visible. This is how most languages get started: they evolve an array of predicates to buzz around pollinating the shit out of the world. I see this as an anticipation of asparagus. And push it aside. It’s the orchid of vowels that acts like a language. And the ballad that pilots it across the mind. It's always a little awkward when a man adopts a mode of gallantry towards a naked woman. But if it hangs in the Louvre it seems a little more box office. The bright lights of Times Square punctuate the night with American products gone crazy. Don’t let the mania fool you. There is often a subtle control that gets to you before they turn the lights off. Once you realize that the brightest places are the darkest of places, the age will pass through an unprecedented process involving blood and pumpernickel and arrive by pulley to clarify the meaning of itself. Heaven appears for one solid second over the peaks of the Cascades. And then we see the granite face of Mount Si towering over the Twin Peaks Café. Snoqualmie Falls raging over the edge of the abyss. And hope for a mystery that never ends. 

The Day The Stars Went Out

Was the United States ever truly here? It vanished so quickly. The constitution, free speech, habeas corpus, posse comitatus, due process, the fourth amendment safeguarding our privacy and the sanctity of our homes, gone. Gone in a flash. Like it never existed.

Or do I delude myself? Are there things I’m not seeing because of my personal bias? Is life in the U.S. as catastrophic as it seems, or am I exaggerating events out of an innate tendency to catastrophize? No. I am not. These are realities. Facts. Concrete evidence. Videos. Savageries impossible to hide, however much deceit and propaganda get thrown at it. You can argue about policies that further enrich the rich and impoverish a population already struggling to survive under the harsh austerities of neo-liberal economics, but you cannot exaggerate or obfuscate a murder. And there have been at least two. Committed with the merciless slick of Minnesota ice.

It is so easy to delude oneself. I do it consciously. I do it unconsciously. I do it in my sleep and I do it standing arms akimbo in daylight, with a cape flowing behind me. One of the more unexpected benefits of feeling powerless, is counteracting it by developing superpowers. One of my superpowers is inconsistency. Another is contradiction. Oh my god do I love contradiction. I love anything that spurs a quiet moment of domestic monotony into a hippodrome of competing theories and flaming enigmas. I enjoy quantum incongruities like Schrodinger’s cat. And a tight-fitting blue suit, red boots, and a long red cape. I do lift dumbbells. So I’m on my way. Give me time. Tell me something and I’ll contradict it. I’ll twist it into a muscle. I’ll make it physical. I’ll build it into something counterclockwise and strange and animate it with electric motors and old rubber belts and industrial scrap à la Jean Tinguely’s noisy, self-destructive sculptures.  

I believe illusions are necessary because the human condition is stark and unforgiving, but when illusions start dominating the agora and replacing reality with the kind of simulacra described by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, life starts resembling the hellishly fake worlds of The Truman Show and The Matrix. It’s fun to watch sci fi movies like Alien and Fahrenheit 451 and tv series like Black Mirror that allegorize dystopic and technological threats with highly destructive agendas. It’s always a relief to leave a nightmare behind with the popcorn and credits rolling on the screen and step back out into the world where life continues as normal. But now we’ve reached a point where the events outside the theaters and streaming services on our flat screen tvs are even more threatening and dark, and most certainly no longer normal. The alien eating the crew of the USCSS Nostromo is a slimy analogue to the unchecked greed devouring what is left of the former United States. And I often feel surrounded by the same eerily bland temperaments of the vegetabalized population in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the sidewalk zombies riveted to lithium hungry smartphones.

Who are these people I see out walking or whizzing by on monowheels or escooters who so ignore your physical presence you begin to wonder if you’re not a ghost? The pods have opened.

Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism thrives on a dumbed-down or atomized population, specifically through the erosion of critical thinking, loneliness born from an imposed isolation similar to the one mandated by the Covid pandemic, and the replacement of truth with consistent, fabricated narratives. She noted that such regimes replace expertise with loyal sycophants and groveling mediocrities and find it much easier to exploit a society that has lost the ability to distinguish fact from fiction than a society with an appetite for inquiry and intellects nimble enough to appreciate the inherent complexities of human behavior and its many contradictions.

Dictators dislike contradiction. That’s because they’re constantly teetering, having come unmoored from the moral universe and having no understanding of the fickleness of existence. Stop respecting existence and you risk existence losing respect for you. You live in fear. Constant insecurity. Because you lead a life of lies. I know how exhilarating that must be, to acquire that ability to lie, distort, create fictions that suit your image, that flatter your beautiful hair, and your winning smile as the paramilitary force you’ve devised bashes in doors and kidnaps people. The power is intoxicating. But it must be constantly fed, like any drug. And that requires lying. The truth won’t do. The truth is bitter and pregnant with nuance. The truth is aligned with liberty and justice, those two old worn-out words, weak with Orwellian legerdemain and semantic leaching. But they do mean things. They mean having the freedom to air your opinions without fear of arrest or banishment. And not having to conceal or compromise your beliefs to keep a job or a friendship alive.

The late Michael Parenti once said you don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day. The further from the peg you go, the tighter the leash around your neck. When people move too far from the peg they get called conspiracy theorists, cynics, curmudgeons, and just plain nuts. I’ve been feeling that leash tighten these last few years. Beginning with Covid. And showing proof of vaccination to a maître d’ so that I might have entry into a restaurant. Growing suspicions. Growing mistrust. Which has cost me some friends. And who knows what else.

I was born in Minneapolis. I lived there until I was twelve. The last house our family occupied in Minneapolis was on the banks of the Mississippi. In the summer I’d go down and gaze at the carp lounging in the sand close to shore. Or that turtle that used to get up on a rock in a shallow part of the river and stay there all day, looking north. Why north? I remember coming home from school one April afternoon and hearing the loud crash and thunder of the ice breaking up. That’s what you fear all winter long. The treacherous, unforgiving ice. Like that time I was ten and skating on a lake at night and two guys got in a big fight and were lying on the ice blood splattered everywhere, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, who were trying to stop it. The prevalence of blood was no doubt due to the blades of their ice skates. It was horrifying. I was unused to seeing violence outside of television dramas and news shows and my feelings about it were intense. Ice can also be beautiful. But I prefer it in a glass of iced tea. Not in people’s eyes.

Some things still feel normal. We still have electricity and running water. The mail gets delivered. The streets are full of cars. The traffic lights are still functioning. People are still trading in the stock exchange. I can watch Lucinda Williams or Glenn Greenwald on YouTube. This afternoon I took a shower. And ate a meat loaf sandwich and watched Landman on Paramount Plus. But I can’t help feel something is missing. And something in its place has been added. I can’t quite define it yet. But it’s not a ticking bomb anymore. It’s been detonated. And its explosion has left a crater the size of the liberty bell right where my heart used to be.

Mouth Shadows

Often afterwards but on the infundibulum while or mostly however some to be still yours for trust with swells or with bouillon but afterwards it will be extravehicular. No doubt it varies for each person depending on what they have and among whom they are. Everything in this sense, which is an infundibulum in relation to them, is far too much of this, and in its current state, far too much of it does not relate to anything other than intermittent lucidity, which is sometimes also a form of drapery. A lesser-known name for the matrix of one within the other is, for us, the source of the rituals. Just as indeed the contiguity is the same for the knees and for their gelatin, but equally resilient for the airplane tickets and the modes for the stalactites it is much the same turbulence as for the foliage. It can be done with kisses, through one person, by another, and through yet another, and we do it through these means, creating an erotica of disproportion. Stealing it is annoying, but only if it's in one place or in another. It is in this way that the hornet is able to use its sting to explain the reason why it drinks.  It is a swamp that grammar gives us, in which to sew words together that on paper resemble a sunset coming into being in the sense of music. We don't know much about what the role is like or how to do it quickly; it's about getting involved and making it your own. This life. This hurly burly. This twister. This infundibulum.

Beyond the Renaissance there are the notebook fingers that heal the fissures within the general enigma that constitutes my being. Anyone’s enigma, really. It’s all one big lūʻau. Beyond the hay mounds drifting through the daydream harvesting its pearls within my chronically irritated convolutions is the glory of the west. Some of my thoughts get a little beyond themselves and get mired in quantum bogs of endless rumination. There’s so much I don’t understand. Things like light and gravity. Space and spice and irreconcilable differences among friends. How are space and time the same thing? How much chlorine are you supposed to put in a swimming pool? What if you don’t have a swimming pool? If you don’t have a swimming pool one will be appointed to you by the court of space and time. This is a court in the fifth dimension which rules with a relativistic code based on the speed of light. According to spacetime theory Act III of King Lear is about to begin at the Whitehall Palace on Boxing Day 1606 as a Tyrannosaurus Rex bends down to sip from a spring in the late Cretaceous and a weary old man in a black fedora walks into a Denver bar in the late fall of 1984 and orders a primordial fireball. This is a concoction of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky mixed with citrus and bitter-sweet liqueurs, sometimes with a pinch of sage, and served on fire to represent the hot, dense, plasma-filled beginning of the universe. The Big Bang. Or whatever it was pulsing in the ovum of a pregnant nothingness.

A splash of gasoline will get you to Lubbock. A splash of whiskey will get you to talk. I am not the first time I was ever this palpable. The closer you get to death the more you feel alive. That’s why old people are the youngest people around. Right when you least expect it you might get another chance. But that’s just life being cruel. We've all seen this before, and yet we continue to let the situation escalate. The equinox was there before I smelled the gumbo. Confusion distorts our words. They form rumors of heresy. I stormed out of the room and went for a nice long walk. Autumn leaves stiffen in a fire. I smell wilderness, and mint. I stir chemicals in my mind. I throw the indigo into an ablution of apples and detours. Mouth shadows flow out with the breath. A paradigmatic powder gets sneezed on the diagram. The distance is still developing. We won’t know where we are until we’re there. This is how space works. It milks what it leaves behind. And sprinkles the future with perfect participles. It’s been really great to talk to you tomorrow. I know you can’t see me. I’m down here. Scratching a match on the wall. And lighting another candle. 

 

It's Risky When You Start

One might also say it’s whiskey when you start, risky when you continue.

Either way, you’ve got a conundrum to unravel, a web to spin, a dilemma to solve, a world to engage, a world to examine cautiously, and anonymously, and a world of words at your fingertips ready to probe the world of dirt and rainbows with a variety of radar, sonar, ultrasonic sensors, scatterometers, dynamometers, dictionaries, libraries, moonberries, apiaries, corollaries, emissaries, dignitaries, dispensaries, limitless intuitions and echolocation.

It's risky when you start with a form of water and use a spoon to describe your anguish. It's often possible even to go so far as to do it with some relish. For one thing it won't be this attenuated, it will be suitable for diffusion and make a nice necklace when the words are all strung together. It's risky when you start accumulating them and using installment payments against a backdrop of rising over-indebtedness to obtain certain satisfactions that only a ghostly belladonna can know. Life is a continual alarm going off and that’s what makes Emily Dickinson such an interesting investigation for me. Her poems are like glass slides smeared with bewildering thread. They’re gnarly, like Bacardi, and give off bubbles. Today’s population, as you can see, has become quite enamored of sequins and other sparkly things. They are turning to these for things for timeless enjoyment, like the guy that already has enough tattoos to drive a Grave Digger across the state line into Arkansas on a Saturday night. I have everything I need for the plasma that is the handshake with oblivion, and plenty of cologne for the one that needs a haircut instead of a liniment. I’ll say one thing and you can say something different and together we’ll make a literature get up and do something feathery and weird and you can rely on that. What you do otherwise is none of my business. 

Because of the fact that the virtue with the highest aspiration is one of a dozen in a wilderness of pain and often used for homecomings, weddings and golf tournaments it will include various rums and other spirits, for no virtue however so mojito, can weigh as much as squalor. Isn’t there a pop song with the refrain one way or another I’m going to get ya? Blondie, right? Released in 1979, the year that I learned to juggle, and discovered Duchamp, and drank Glenfiddich. But enough about me. What about you? What are you up to these days? I like walking. And eating blueberries while reading a book. There are things I’ve learned. A leg will help in propping up a nice cuddling by random selection and to mix and pop into quantum equations like chalk and glow from end to end before continuing to oblige whatever it is that gives you a beard and a place to go. I recommend the seashore. Say Copacabana. Because life is a bonfire on the night's archaic neck and from which its music hums in and out like systole and diastole and is acquired through a wardrobe of flowery frills and velocities, the same way it is with a man and a woman to love one another and surpass its ecstasies with a load of toads on them like Terence McKenna.

Spain. The Costa Brava. May, 1972, there were nightclubs in Lloret de Mar that didn't open until three a.m. Franco was still in power. And Franco ran a fascist regime. The Policia Armada carried a sidearm called the Star S Pistol. Whenever I saw them coming late at night, I always checked my pockets to make sure I had my passport. Of course, I went about it very discreetly. They were nicknamed los grises because their uniforms were grey. And also, I suspect, because they occupied a very grey zone in the political spectrum. It felt very Hemmingway. The frontier between the human mind and external reality is a curious zone. It’s odd how a seeming normalcy can exist within a regime of oppression and fear. Take a peach. I love everything about them. The fuzz, the sweet, savory juice, and the heft of their heavenly consistency. They’re far more erotic than an apple. Prettier than a prune. More lenient than a lemon. Way nicer than fascism. You can relax with a peach. And try to forget what happened in Minneapolis January 7^th, 2026.

Boxing during a full moon is glorious. But dancing during a new moon is just plain lunacy. Of all the activities available to us during our brief tour of life, there's one I never completely understood: golf. But I’ll come clean: I never played it. Perhaps if I gave it a shot, the mystery of its apparent monotony would ignite something within, a long-buried need to hit a tiny ball into a tiny distant hole. There are a lot of things I've never done. I've never ridden in a hot air balloon. I've never sat at a conference table discussing complex geopolitical problems with the fate of the world in my hands and a line of coke up my nose. I never dated Brigitte Bardot. I never stood at a gaming table in Monaco gazing discreetly at everything with a knowing gaze, the way Sean Connery did it. Not so much the other dudes. They never mastered it. I will never know what it’s like to give birth. I could never hang Christmas lights on a radio tower. I am good at a few things. Jujitsu isn’t one of them. I am good at spying. You just make yourself anonymous, keep a low profile, and notice things. Little things. Like lipstick on the rim of a shot glass. Morning light on a breakfast table. Orange peels. Champagne glasses. Crumbs. Sugar cubes. Coffee. Body bent forward. Head on the table. Overhead fan spinning round on the back of a tablespoon.

We must try to describe our world such as it is, in this current moment, and from this point onward keep talking, keep writing, keep filming, keep venting our grievances, until we reach the full pitch of life’s reality, which is never going to be but one thing, but a vital conduit to other dimensions, other ports of call where the drinks are cheap and the postulates all burble like rain. In doing so, it is understood that, in case it hasn't yet been possible to ask certain indelicate questions, we must assume a hypothetical chromaticism and push forward like a textbook preface drunk on passion, presumption, and panoply. Ask yourself: why do I bother to protrude when so many others before me have entered the ring with such miscreant bluster? What do I bring to the table, besides bad jokes and Byronic baloney? All of this is rapidly escalating toward a storm in a teacup, which is precisely what happens when a wind baffles a restaurant awning.

 

Little Cloud Sky And The Cataract

Last Sunday, while waiting for a friend to arrive in the spacious lobby of the Seattle Art Museum, I amused myself with the cataract in my left eye. With my right eye closed, I could look at people and focus my cataract on any random individual within range of my vision. Their heads would shrink and distort like a portrait by Francis Bacon. I found this to be an amusing activity for an arty farty Sunday. It was the penultimate day for viewing the Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism exhibit. Play with my cataract was interrupted by two toddlers running up and down on a metal grate under the windows, making a terrible racket. They were creating their own art. Unfortunately, they were moving too fast to give them the Francis Bacon cataract treatment. Instead, I turned my gaze towards the puffy, cloud-like shapes hanging from the ceiling, each one identical to the other with two black dots for eyes and a tiny little upturned crescent for a smile. The exhibit is titled Little Cloud Sky, and was created by the Los Angeles-based art duo FriendsWithYou (Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III). These cartoonish confections of jubilant cumulus weren’t entirely random, not like real clouds, they were neatly arranged into rows, regimented like a military parade and elicited a response somewhere between euphoria and alarm, giddy buoyancy and a bald, high-definition vapidity. I subjected one of them to the transformative mischief of my cataract. The result was unsatisfying. The little cloud collapsed into a Styrofoam packing peanut, not the fierce dragon of provocation I hoped my cataract would awaken by distortion. I’m always misjudging things, including my own experience of them. I like it when things get punchy. I like it when things punch back. Rather than recede, and ghost me. Or walk around in circles wondering what the hell happened.

It Goes Without Saying

it’s the new year I feel like falling upside down
conversing with whirlybirds 
how funny i’ve gone this far in life without reading
Valley of the Dolls
though i did read Stoner
quite recently and learned a lot about the corruption
of academia which came as no surprise
what surprised me was the honesty
i believe that feeling can be expanded
to include my fingers
as i wait for the sun to rise in the east
i’m going to take a deep breath now and inflate
an empire of otherworldly beings
reality is mostly ice
an angel told me that
and whatever this is
because it’s words
everything you experience
is a fuchsia
 
when consciousness becomes words it
becomes a shape
and glows in a grill
charcoal plays tricks
it takes stamina
to flutter your patterns
like semaphores
of fire
they will ignite your brain
and this is called heat
the sanctity of trance
smells of romance
maybe I just need to eat more
read more
books about the transformative ores of metaphors
and the golden faucets of Venice
Vivaldi’s violins
the canals of Venice are drying up
thanks to the miasmic suck
of commerce and tourists
people say get real
I say get unreal
climb into your body
without making a sound 
 
I offer this substitute
of emotional quirkiness
because it’s sublime to feel this way
what a mess to wake up to every day
this is how the search for consciousness
is nothing more
nothing less
than a lobster wiggling its antennae
at the local aquarium
 
entanglements
happen all the time
some things are said
which have no basis
in what Kant meant
they just get said
i’m not going to argue with you
that’s not how i do things
i like to thump my chest
and swing through the jungle
releasing an ululating yodel
if space and time are the framework
within which the mind is constrained
to construct its experience of reality
who can explain the presence of gargoyles
I always know when Baudelaire is around
I smell hashish
you need music
mud can’t play a harp 
but the wind can

if this were a Vermeer
it would look like Idaho
busy doing nothing
because the brush is delicate
i take this to heart
it’s a curious medium
especially when it meanders
sounds become tangible
old brown shoes
with a whiff
of abstraction
each bristle
sparkles when it curves
into feathers and hunts
for a way into heaven
and for that i need a pair of eyes
so i can scratch my thoughts
on the sky 

Existence is a precarious business. Sinuous, convoluted, Daedalean. An old man on the English moor shaking his fist at the howling winds. Humility comes later, after the tragedies and storms. And to each individual comes a moment when the air snaps into words and starts a smorgasbord of ideas. I like ideas. And imaginary solutions, like the art of fermentation. They say we know less about the ocean than we do the other planets and stars in the universe. The same could be said about consciousness, which is maddeningly elusive, like the weight of the air on a G string, and tastes like infinity. I feel better now. Consciousness bubbles along with sturgeon and catfish in its currents and some coastline in its dreams of sweet oblivion. I’m like that French kid, Rimbaud, who drifted down the Meuse on a barge in a drunken state. Except I’m much older, and drive a hard bargain when it comes to methods of overstimulation. I’m more like that other guy, Jarry, who bicycled around Paris on a stripped-down, fixed-gear Clément Luxe bicycle, often without brakes, and using pistols to clear the paths. Except I drive a Plymouth Barracuda and exercise a certain magisterial air in traffic jams, much of it involving my middle finger. Life in the 21^st century is hard. Mortality craves wisdom. But I’ll never understand money.  

My comprehension of the world has turned ugly. I see dead trees. Dark dreary days. It’s not even a matter of hope anymore, it’s a question of atmosphere. Hard to explain. I find it difficult to describe coleslaw, much less postmodernism. Since the riverbed is marshy, the afterlife is filled with a cosmic haze. It feels hospitable, and glows like a son of a bitch. I've been talking about this a lot lately. People nod sagely, then order a piroshki. Somewhere on the outer edge of a hot dog, there are moments that offer something broader to our understanding than nothing at all. Horizons, for example, which aren’t actual things, but seem like things. They’re hyperobjects, like the U.S. postal service, or Netflix. Death is a hyperobject. And so is capitalism. So are oil spills. Antibiotics. Artificial Intelligence. Murderous government thugs on slippery ice. Or the sum of all Styrofoam. Words strung together like a ball of contentious lettuce. If there are hyperobjects, might there also be miniobjects? The sound of rain clanking between your teeth. Gravity trapped in a jar of stars. It has a kind of romance to it. And a strange kind of dentistry. I just want you to know that I can feel your presence. And I’m glad you’re here. 

my anguish is sulfur
my shirt is a fine silken teal
you can do what you want
but stay off of my blue suede shoes
look how interesting a sound can be
and screams
and sirens and vowels 
i can hear a chestnut fall
and hit a car two blocks away
the haunting rhythms
of Zuni gourd rattles
allow me the pleasure
of stepping into the void
nobody owns time
nobody owns space
each sound is an atmosphere
of freely espoused implications
folds of air
so engorged with spirit
garden gnomes
hop around on pogo sticks
 

Consciousness Is Our Ocean

We prove nothing if we remain unknown, whether below or above nothing, which is soul. We have calories that our planet feeds us, or so my instinct tells me, my era, our peacocks, our frolicking in the snow, that’s it, our leverage, our redemption, our burning art, our colossal mimosas and ice age foundries, our brutal subtleties and Apache rattles, but above all our art, our brave and burning art, our capacity for caprice, our tightrope walking and crazy extravagance, our bizarre intensity and textbook dirt. A lot can hinge on a sack of good fertilizer and an acre or two of idiosyncrasy. We can say things here that might be considered extravagant in another context, but here simply means that the varnish is authentic that sings the light into being, the sheen of which can dispel the weariness caused by swaggering expectations. Therefore, I've decided to embellish the courtroom with a character on the wall of Plato's cave acting as judge. Whatever you do, don’t look at the jury. It’s up to you to decide. Is life a frontier, or an incalculable honor? A brush is the one thing that the squeamish might call a gondola, were it not for the stirrups I employ to ride a cowlick, and the clatter of investigations hooked to my belt.

If you’re thinking feathers, I'm already there. The twilight is my testament and the rebus is my paradigm. This is my photo taken in light rain. And this my photo taken in rough garments. I was a push-up then, a peeled banana raining subtleties of free will. Call it a thin Apollinaire and the rattle it takes for there to be a roar at the beginning of a movie. This is precisely what I mean by swarm. It's an eye underneath a lid of skin, swarming with yellow nails. Someone knocking on a door of muscle, and a range of hills covered in birch. Whatever is above it, it offers it, not as a battle, but a slope. This is not what it was intended to be but what it became in the process of jumping forward into the past, and suggested that I walk away from there, which is what I did, and ended up here, wherever here is. I looked around. I planted a flag. I said a prayer. I grew vegetables. And this is the way my shoulders grew wings, and found some other place to get lost.

With what I did to the window I have illustrated what a touch can do to glass. I reached for the moon and got a fondue. After all it's your party and what if your head fell off would you miss it? You might want to get ahead of it. Depth is a slap to the well-tailored, and if I've got a place to go, I get on my bike and drink the sweet morning air. For I am the we among us. The seminal demand. The sweet response. A chorus on stilts enlivening the calliope. It’s us against the one who is next to you, sipping gin. We're over there, behind that range of skillets, banging our spatulas on a juggernaut. This is what I thought it meant to walk with someone into the beyond. You find a common problem and blow air into it hoping for Switzerland to rise and float above the unintended consequences this will release. Wind comes along, and there it goes with it roots dangling down and canopy of floating alpinists, headed into a palace of pumpernickel. I had a feeling this might happen. We are, after all, what I said was over there, steam hissing out of its perforations, because it's massive and full of heat, and until we find my hat and compass, I must assume is the coastline of Ibiza. So welcome. Welcome to Ibiza. Or Reykjavik. I don’t know. I’m handing the wheel over to you now. Consciousness is our ocean, and that’s the north star.

If it is written, so be it. But if it’s not written, here come the pixels. I’m moving along now on a sort of paragraph, a place of lush surroundings with little resemblance to Monday. Or anything made of letters. We are, of course, emboldened, fragmentary, ultraviolet, since we move as a pair of figure skaters, spinning in a frenzy. And this is what letters do, when they spin their syllables into rodeos. I know what it means to put trust in a stepladder. As it happens, my personal resources are unlikely to be enough. I need a wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater and a warm, contrasting sweater. Maybe some alternatives. Vitamins. Enzymes. Trysts. There's always at least one flirt in the room who causes a sound to be there, a guffaw or a banjo. The bulbs draw attention to the back, where a grassy, ​​cracked redness is visible. That's it, our excuse for being here. It makes a sound like little bells, a rain surrounding a secret desire, orthogonal, compulsive, and improbably mink. 

  

Everything Has A Thread

It’s still raining. Flooding is rampant in the state of Washington. It's cold, too. 46℉. It's the winter solstice. 3:00 a.m., I hear a small pulse coming from my bedside radio. Satie. Gymnopédie. I fall back asleep. 8:00 a.m. I get out of bed. The world is still here. I can feel it under my feet. The carpet is soft. It signifies sanctuary and comfort. Why have hardwood floors become so popular? A renewed zeal for material prestige has encouraged a certain petulance, as if fussiness were now a sign of refinement, and actual refinement was seen as outdated as wall-to-wall carpet. This comes from my knowledge of physiology. It wasn’t handed to me. I did it by cultivating fennel. One susses things out by a kind of fumbling. Reading signs. Analyzing tusks. Deconstructing Babylon. Interpreting emotions. Footprints, fingerprints, blood, hair, semen, handwriting, chemical residue, crumpled aluminum foil, fictitious entities, nervous leprechauns, paint chips, skin cells, wet floors. Profiling DNA, CPU, FAQ, EKG, QED, TLA, TSA, FBI, CIA, R.E.M., E.L.O., LSD, NYU, WWI, WWII, ABC, NBC, NPR, and Bikers Against Dumb Drivers. Deciphering graffiti. Visiting Tahiti. Vetting Jeff Tweedy. Erecting a teepee. Scanning the cosmos for radio signals. Noting down anomalous atmospheric phenomena. Casting I Ching hexagrams. Hunting bioluminescent mushrooms in the forests of Paraguay. Studying textures as texts. Otherwise, nothing changes, the prayers for well-being continue, as does Roche Bobois. 

The journey to the afterlife has nails in it, or so I once believed. Something lurking among these words appeals to my otherworldly side. Something striking like honesty, or a kitchen stool with smooth red legs and a vinyl vivacity. Unless I move from this to that, I don't see the other side of the dark matter forming the cosmic web. I just see paint. Skin. Introversion. By what means do I launch this new idea, this new approach to language involving alchemy, despair, ecstasy, impropriety, type A plugs, T.S. Eliot, loafs of brioche, interplanetary dictionaries crackling with celestial mythologies? Language is a chameleon, and where words attempt to create a description of beauty, it gets lost in its own complexity, dissolves into coefficients of verbal bric-a-brac, and merges with the void. For nothing in this world is simply proverbial. Not if it’s made with clay and has a reason to exist. Not if it’s pink, and it’s a Tuesday, and the hardware store is open.

I have a thought beneath what I thought came from the words I put here when I wasn't looking. It's a step down from a job I held in the past, and the events surrounding it have been transformed into a story. It’s ablaze with untenable ideas and fairy tale forklifts. Do you sometimes feel like something or someone is trying to put you in a box? I’d like to help you with your problems, but I’ve got a leaky gasket and a bowl full of bills. Ever get one of those urges to throw everything away and head to the great outdoors with a biology in your destination and a dictionary in your backpack? My progress can’t be measured by pavement. It has the form of a summer and the charm of Saskatchewan. You could call it a gestalt. Or a freshly waxed pair of skis. When we is with us I can turn plural and include everything I left behind. If I was the sun up there, I’d go with my love everywhere. I would. I’m not kidding. Here’s why. I’ve got a plum in my left hand and a plume in my right hand. This would indicate a certain charm, n’est-ce pas? Something about to happen. The sly hiss of potential. This is it then. The big kahuna in my garage. The tuna comes with a motherboard and works by tilting the lumber against the wall, as you would a rawhide. Or the very fat chance of a river of words flowing inside your eyes, all the way to the ocean. Seagulls and mist. Foghorn. Lighthouse. Viriginia Woolf reading a letter.

Our movements are always directed towards the past, but the future is in the rearview mirror, which messes everything up. Traffic lights make things clear. They depend on color. The color orange is the first time anything gave me a reason to go against language both in my passion and my affinity to green, and discover its true nature, which signals me to move forward. There's an equation there that apologizes to us as if it's dealing with Wednesday and has no time for cheese sampling. Equations are like that: supercilious, perfumed, gregarious. If our logic is flawed, we pick it up and smash it against the wall. The resulting image is a waterfall of coins in a Vegas casino, bells ringing, lights flashing, jaws dropping. And this is how we get through it. How we stir the soup, as it were. I comb my hair with a munitions dump. It gives me a wild look. And that’s how I begin my day. I fold the darkness into a jewel and dangle it from a silver chain. 

It's hard to believe that there was a time in my life when I was obsessed with disco. Meaning, I hated it. But what a luxury. To let your mind drift without any intrusions from the so-called real world. The violence of the rich. The futility of the poor. The uncanny persistence of the Stones finally at an end. Arthritis. The art is right but the joints are inflamed. The bones are tired. The muscles in pain. The notes in knots. An epoch is fading into the past while a new one crawls out of the lab of some gazillionaire. If the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up. How do you digest such circumstances? With relish. With vigor. With pleasure. There’s nothing else I’d rather do than do nothing but give off a nice warm light. And sit back and examine all my tendencies and countertendencies. And do it auspiciously. As if none of it mattered. But it does, of course, on some level. Whatever level that may be. It’s probably not all that level. Because everything has a bias. And everything has a thread.

I remember the French landscape. Those two women near Alet-les-Bains who wanted to touch my hair, which was quite long at the time. It was like walking back in time to discover an existence that had not yet lost its enchantments. It was a moment that felt pleasantly carnivalesque: I had become an object of curiosity. I am who I am, but according to this principle: anything that can be thrown into the air that can advance the idea of ​​alterity is welcome. The concept of identity is notoriously ambiguous. At that moment, I was hair.  I was more than myself. I was an algebra of circumstance. The we between us. The banana is peeled, like this: a single touch can ignite the history under our skin. And a chain falls from our body.