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.