I’m Just Here For The Music

One by one the words wander around like a drunken noise opening and closing for maintenance. It's difficult to throw the mind at a window and get nothing but glass. This is why we have shadows. Shadows are erratic, and words are shadows. Words are a way of undressing, as if, from head to toe, we were united by two different religions, and joined ourselves in warmth. The ideas that surge across the page, like the joints of fingers, show what distinguishes a temperament from a temperature, and how they might hang their fleece jackets on a song for the grammar surrounding them, and walk naked into oblivion.

These are hard times. Nothing is stable. But if words flow spontaneously from one idea to another until an equilibrium is reached, an abyss can dream of lava amid the sparks of the sacred and achieve full glory in a thermodynamic of impulse. A voluptuous heat will express itself in joules inside the body, and a framework of propagation will support whatever glass you choose to put in your window. I recommend tempered, with a hint of foreground, glazed with paradise.  

After a friend died, we sat a black table and reminisced, fueling our conversation with cognac and wine. Later we had cassoulet and clafoutis. A toast was made. And the spirits remained quiet. And the candles went out. And there was sudden laughter. And a ghostly image sitting in a corner of France, on a warm day in August, watching the seagulls, and the jolliness of the waves.

With or without a neuron, we find the frontier where our identities are hungry for an alliance with something larger than a tilted pony and grander than an airplane. A total lack of moderation or constraint can be a source of filigree and untangle our knots. This will require lampshades and parodies of erotica. The lives we lead when we’re sleeping are different than the lives we inhabit in our lyceums. Here is where a little sorcery can be serviceable. It is a candle of such bald vagueness that it seems like ants to an agate, and will blow our minds to the rampant winds, where the windmills creak and the houses are deserted and empty and the horses just chew their grass and ruminate. It’s always the intervals, the places between the cities that offer the most potential. But there is one drama in particular that prepares us for Brown Willy, Cornwall, and you can’t fit it in a word. It’s too indulgent. Too bloody dynamic. It successfully predicted the existence of antimatter, the intrinsic spin of desire, magnetic moments of pure idleness, and Cher on TV. I can’t say it’s what it isn’t when it isn’t what it isn’t. And all the meanings it expands. It just doesn’t work. And for that, I commend it. And recommend it. And feed it everything I have.

Which isn’t much, incidentally. But nothing is written in stone, besides lichen. Any circumstance, however impoverished, can be compensated by a generous spirit. It all comes down to perception. Take a watermark, those semi-transparent logos identifying ownership or copyrighted intellectual property. A watermark is a reverie of lines, be it fuchsia or an assortment of clouds, which are the silent songs of the air. You can choose to interpret as a thing of beauty or a pesky point of law with a decorous appearance. In this instance, it is clouds. It is drifting. It is that interval between paying strict attention to the details of this world and not paying attention at all, which is a blatant inaccuracy since our language must be bent a little to accommodate a circumstance of some vagueness, a phenomenon outside the empirical realm, in which the mind is as large as the sky and just as casual in its occupation of space.

From one end to the other of the blazing February sky was nothing but a desultory convoy of clouds. They moved like worms, satisfying their needs with a long slow undulation, while below, the infinite calm that inhabits the shores of paradise carried in its currents the ash of a long full day. This is how things become cathedrals. Details of crepuscular light ignited the trees while dynamos of fresh new sensation held me in thrall as I clawed at the threads of my old armchair. Themes of heavenly dispensation pulsed through my veins like cosmic gold. I’m a man of the world, a traveler, but I’ve never seen a backstage rain unleash itself with such force onto the stage of existence and inscribe its meaning in so many streams and mosses.

Our flair returns when I find my being is on our side of the predicament. Which is to say, it’s a matter of stellar importance, this overwhelming confusion, this parable of hunger. You can feel it coming. You can feel it squirm in your body like a like an emotion and struggle to put into words what is largely anathema to any language: the inability to say one simple thing about linoleum. So many experiences are made of ochre and dirt. While many other aspects of our passage through life reveal so many beautiful things, such as the phosphor of ancient bones in Colorado moonlight or summer oils shining on a young woman's skin, there are things that elude a simple assessment and require a deeper probe, a deeper application of our faculties.

Often thoughts, one after another, several at once, tumbling around like clothes in a dryer, have the curious effect of moving me as far away as possible from the granularity of brick into the hypnotic regions of prestidigitation. This comes from watching the washing machine too long.

Prestidigitation is a common side effect of writing. It involves quick, nimble finger movements to entertain or deceive an audience, and is a worldly inflation of one's power to inflict a maximal amount of change upon the things that make one sad.

It helps, sometimes, to think of words as small, crawling, soft-bodied invertebrates with wills and agendas of their own, but which generously include our thoughts in their parade, indecorously shrouding reality with the intoxications produced by the power of effusion.

Accidents do, sometimes, occur. A bitter month or lever which has a pleated surface, usually striped, becomes languid when splashed with darkness. And sometimes a brilliant idea shines like a shooting star, deconstructing logic and prophesying UFOs.

Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, for example, where the words are bullets and the horses are wise.

At home, I am sometimes myself, sometimes a weird and distant tone, sometimes a bare minimum, sometimes a highly impractical objective, and sometimes a remote periphery on the outskirts of reality crazy about bears and confetti. Tonight, I arose from a crash of hydraulics and metal in an effort to find the molecular core of poetry. I’m not looking for answers. I’m looking for delegates. I am looking for a narrative that I can fill with the dark energy of negotiation. I’m looking for a way out. I’m looking for a way in. There are rumors from other worlds, as always, but none with a highway to paradise. The truth lies in what we cannot do without and what we cannot impose on others; therefore, there is never enough balance to achieve a happy medium. That's why life is often so trying that you can't put it in a story without backing away and surprising yourself with a confession. But let’s not get too personal. I’m just here for the music. This isn’t a time for parables and lessons. It’s a time for resistance. And whatever feeds the soul.