The Struggle Inside

Iconostasis. What’s that? Windows to heaven. Icons in an orthodox church. Mirabilas.  Apocalypse. Metropolis. Hippopotamus. These, too. These produce images. And images have questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? I don’t know about you, but I’m buying a ticket to paradise. Wherever that is. I think it’s one of those things that only exist in poetry. Meaning women in bodice skirts, white linen blouse, embroidered aprons, and black leather shoes doing the Hambo. James Joyce sipping oolong in Trieste. Epiretinal membrane, a thin, translucent layer of fibrous tissue or scar tissue that forms on the inner surface of the retina. Here’s looking at you, kid. Sometimes, I seem to be living in the past. There is some validity to this, if we may be permitted to include memory in our pataphysical toolkit. When desire goes unsatisfied yet maintains a sturdy intensity, it begins a mode of seduction. Which rarely, if ever, goes well. Not a good optic, as they say. It’s always the heated and awkward poems that end up back in the barn, transmitting elegies in long bellowing moos. The wilder ones jump the fence and take off for the prairie. And end up passed out on the floor at an open mike in Larame.

Translation is an art. Spin a pumpkin, get a fjord. That sounds corny, but I mean it. The very air has grown taut. There’s a poem in it. I just have to find it. I can smell it. It’s giving off an odor of popcorn mingled with Arthur Shchopenhauer. There has just a been trauma. Humanity has taken its mask off. It’s a total mess. What happened to the eyes? The expression looks so utterly sad with a tinge of narcissism. Its expression is flagrant, and yet timidly immaterial. The explanation is a reverie regarding a hiatus overlooking the anatomies of some modern specimens, specifically one with the teeth of a saw, and the other with a banana-shaped chest and a head like a forest of blurry animals. The texture is rough, like a bad joke at a Hungarian wedding. It takes a lot of motion to make any frame contemporary. And brother, this joint has gone nuts. Zombies on scooters. Academies of ache. Odysseys of ohm. Electrical resistance. Poetical nonexistence.

Sometimes the best solution is to plunge right ahead into the conjectural universe. I despise the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist.’ It shuts down conversations. It shuts down speculation. We live in a speculative universe. The narrative is old and beyond my comprehension. It burst out of nothingness, like a pair of old work boots tumbling out of a closet. A holy ghost in the pocket of a wool coat. Planets colliding with comets. Ideologies colliding with reality. There is nothing linear about it. It’s 100% nonsense. Nonlinear as a Moroccan goat in an argan tree. Human voices male and female singing Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus in a Gothic cathedral. Everything is a sunset sandwich served on a platter of snow. Meaningful as a slap to the face. Silly as a translation of a reclining figure in a state of lassitude. And twice as redemptive.

What is at issue is what causes change. The struggle inside. The contest. With yourself. I’m always running a few steps ahead of my ego. The ego is an egg of remorse. The id is hid in a lid of Bonne Maman cherry jam. An officer of the law flickering inside a prostitute. No longer things, but what happens between things. Liberation is a libation of the spirit. But does it truly exist? Nothing exists with total autonomy. How could it? Only poetry can do that. Especially when it cracks its worrying eggshell head apart and supplies the world with its magic string and troubadours. What, at root, is the reality contemporary to us is hazy as the hazard we can’t see until it gets here. It’s always like that now, crazy and unpredictable. An ongoing dissociation of chilly euphemisms. The inviolate crust of a nitroglycerin thought. To each his natural own. It takes a lot of language to produce a raspberry. A real raspberry. With a justifiable handlebar and a nebular milieu. The deafening cheers as the wrestlers enter the ring. And the words are put in place. What we’re talking about. What we are after. And for which we are instrumental.