The Art Of Being Null

This heat rising in the throat is a cargo of indignation. I don’t know what else to call it. Words are oscillations that travel through space transferring hair and stepladders. Equanimity is a rash by which a body can determine if it's fictitious or military and is often notorious for its long tongue and fuzzy dirigibles. These are basically lumps of sound by which a sculpture employs its grip on the surrounding air. Yesterday I saw a kangaroo push an intonation through the wall of a drugstore. What I saw was a jaded, pessimistic representation of crocuses canter across a tree stump. This made me feel clumsy. And human. More human than I felt chemically feasible, given the discharge of flak at my feet, and the various eruptions in my thumbnail.

Brutality may be used as a shield against disappointment, but I recommend canals as a superior means of infiltration. Sometimes a local citizen may provide a more personal perspective, and an increase in syrup at the breakfast table, completely incompatible with our goals but otherwise means to a higher purpose than is provided by the martinets on the university faculty. The ghouls are rules. Gaiety has its inclinations and may sometimes include justice, but is more apt to be jerky and disconnected, which is good for our nobler intentions, but bad for the calibrations.

It has been said that the poem explores the tense, often dangerous relationship between the human and the divine, emphasizing the poet's task to mediate between the two. The poet acts as a messenger or priest, crawling over the mountain tops to give birth to divine laws. Or the explorer arriving on the shore of a neglected sensation. One is one or the other in the one that goes to the other, and makes it all shiver, and whirl across a dune. This explains how dice and words get involved in drugs that affect the mind and surrounding foliage. And how combustion serves the engine as the engine serves the ebullience of cherries. There are still a few places where you can order a piroshki and a shot of vodka without drawing undue suspicion. What Mallarmé discovered is that one can also feed on cataclysms and survive the tedium of hell if is one sufficiently embalmed in mayonnaise. If you’re going to take the reins of a poem as it writes itself with the aid of your fingers, it behooves one to fret over vowels and rock hard on the rhythms. Carouse among Luddites. Farm semicolons. Magnetize ghosts. Unlock the precipice.

What does it mean to be null? I know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean collateral. I’m not trying to be a wise guy, but I’ve been around here long enough to know an omelet from a pancake. I know whenever there’s an abyss nearby. You can smell it. It smells of nothing. And that’s what makes it so deadpan. Every time a transgression makes the night tremble, I know there is a strange new color nearby. It only makes sense. If a quantum evening flowers in a book, the world seems more enticing, more disembodied. And I like that. I like being null. Comfortably numb. Not so much indifferent as preternaturally seasoned. Materially unencumbered. From which it follows that to be acquisitive is contrary to the spirit of nullity. And, in many ways, quite personal. Like the pottery scene in Ghost, in which Demi Moore is spinning a wet clay phallus and Swayze joins her as Unchained Melody plays in the background. Life is preoccupation with itself. Infectious names that slice the air into little adventures. That kind of thing. Things like corners. Where you can put a rocking chair. And enjoy the art of being null.