A Button For Bangkok

I’m here to drink life, he shouted, and ordered another bottle with a memorable afternoon agitating its hues. We understand what's there, the paradise of the perplexed, the sunbeam born in a large oval bowl of contrary feelings. Yes. Yes. That's it, my heart digging into the sky with a spade of art. The squabble that’s been aging for over twenty years like a slice of demented cheese. Overturned. Flipped. The warm feeling that costs nothing but buzzes all night like a beehive. I can taste the sky in every carrot, every plunge into Buddhism, every cathedral full of songs, every little distinction breaking its barriers and getting controversial. I believe that nothing is truly nothing, and did so when the sidewalk aggrandized its cracks and idiosyncrasies, and the only one to take notice was a Yorkshire Terrier named Isidore Ducasse. I believe in zig, I believe in zag, I believe in zigzags, chin sags and dishrags. I believe the best location for viewing the stars is a strip mall with her ingots in a bra. This is why. Why I honor the mending stick that sensitizes the cracked musk of Mongolia. Why I sit here listening to a dying language talk to the body of work between my hands. I believe every tattoo loves the skin it’s on. That the fates like to tease people. That irony is their favorite prod. And billionaires are their biggest joke. That nobody gets. We’re all still waiting for the punchline.

There's a place where one can manipulate one's symptoms near our most primitive instinct. This has led to a situation in which we glaze our despair with the shine of metaphor. I have, for this reason, decided to bark at the traffic. Over the winter, I think about phenomena that can ignite a light in the mind. The first thing I notice is pretty. The second thing I notice is ugly. The third thing I notice is gambling on the ambiguity of beauty, the electric-blue body and crimson head of the Malayan Coral Snake. Rita Hayworth in Gilda. The eerie bioluminescence of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. The secret heart of poetry, which can destroy a life while giving it its ultimate meaning. Which is a filet of cardboard jerked east by the spasmodic gusts of rain sweeping the Times Square Billboard. Which is an alligator unzipping its throat and out pops the flower missing from every bouquet. Which smells of swamps and semen. And is the source of all sorcery and the forgeries of the divine.  

There’s a stain of geography on the globe. If you stare at it a long time it becomes a country populated by jugglers and vagabonds. There are many active volcanos and picnics and rash, chaotic assemblies. That’s the arctic on top and calculus on the bottom. The land of a thousand infatuations. A here and now that runs contrary to Monday. I feel warm towards someone in the hope their shoes may one day engulf them in foam. It’s how I sharpen my instincts on the roots of a western red cedar. My obscurity feeds on the galaxies surrounding our Abbagenesis. Did you know that there are twelve million swimming pools on Proxima Centauri? It gives me a reason to employ a semicolon in a contextual gallimaufry. But I’m not in the mood just now. I’ve got a bunch of crazy ideas built out of wire, immoderate articulations and aromatic philosophies to put on display for nobody in particular. Life is a big mosaic but sometimes the landlord wants his son back and a cop below in the street is talking to you through a megaphone. Irony glitters everywhere. When things go wrong there’s usually something right that made it available in the first place. It’s how we like it here. Ribbons of contrary air shaking a patch of devil’s walking stick, a volume of Emily Dickinson on my lap and 70 degrees in the shade.

I think it’s time that I faced reality. I have a face for the quick, a face for the many cycles of life, and a face for gazing out of coffeehouse windows on rainy days. But I don’t have a face for reality. I’ve got a face for daydreaming, which has been the bane of supervisors and a frequent cause for dismissal, a face that sometimes looks back at me from the bathroom mirror and bears a disturbing similarity to the face of my father, long deceased, which gives his likeness an added jolt, and a face which is really more of a mask that I find convenient for socializing and playing poker in the Ozarks. There are 32 to 33 individual muscles in the human face, depending on how they’re counted, the temperature and humidity of a given circumstance, the weight of the emotion being lifted into expression, and the level of transparency with which one feels comfortable. I like the faces painted by Francis Bacon. I find their distortions to be apt reflections of the world’s current realities, the various contortions of logic and daily complications with which the human experiment must now cope. The face is theatrical. It’s a device. It’s something to hide behind. And for those who refuse to face reality, there’s Botox. And for those who do, there’s Clint Eastwood. Which is Hollywood’s way of saying stand tall, smoke a cigar, and squint. It’s not reality. But it is entertaining. And then there’s Renée Jean Falconetti, who played Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s 1928 version. The intensity is jaw-dropping. Antonin Artaud – as sympathetic bailiff and interrogator Jean Massieu - speaks to her on the stake, about to be burned alive. “Tell me, how can you still believe that you were sent by God?” “His ways are not our ways.” And you can see the shock of anguish and passion subtly manifesting the power of the sublime in her fatigued mortal eyes.

How much does existence weigh? This will largely depend on the fulcrum of your generosity. If I believe my nose has an opinion about the smell of morning, the meanings and the seriousness of things here grow exponentially, and this will include the humidity of farce. Don’t Worry Baby, sang the Beach Boys, so many years ago they seem freeze-dried in beauty. A beauty, shall we say, of a particular time, a particular place, and a particular feeling. The time was 1965, the place was Cupertino, and the feeling was an awakening of passion that felt completely new and wonderful to my being. A fullness of being it felt awkward to contain. It’s always so gratifying to discover someone else who shares your opinions, especially when they emerge from the scribbles and jungles of the unconscious. We strive to be rational. Most of us do, I think. There are those other needs, however, that don’t get properly acknowledged in a culture such as ours, where the emphasis in the universities is on STEM, the gods of technology and the money to be made in real estate and war. The humanities have been kicked to the curb. Which is also where a lot of the homeless now find themselves. Others dream larger. Others dream of one day finding a button for Bangkok on the eighth floor of a Supreme Being. Others look for otherness in a world of lusterless and colorless dualities. Good, bad. Up, down. Open, close. Democrat, Republican. Right wing, left wing. Love, hate. And so on. And so on is where I live. Not the so-so. I’m not a so-so person, not generally. What I am mainly is someone who gets on an elevator and if I ever see a button for Bangkok, I’m pressing it. And when the doors open, I’m getting off. And if I find myself in Budapest, I’ll find a café and order a chimney cake. And so on.

The gravity of a certain house hides someone beyond the distance to Saturn, who neither cracks their theories with granite nor writes the poetry of navigation with textbook cachet. It is because we have plugs that electricity can exist in a constant state of franchise. I use it to brush my teeth, dry my hair, and illumine the face in the mirror looking back at me with worry and supposition. I garden the cartilage of language with the power of bone. Anybody familiar with a philodendron can regret an afternoon rain spent on clothing a circumstance with habit. You know how it goes: thought unravels a fist of earth and discovers propagation. This starts everything dancing in a mania of dancing girl ginger. A groan by tumble is everything it precedes, and ends with a filigree motif. It’s how I met your mother and taught her the ways of our people. We grew our curls against the admonitions of the ambivalent and nobody scattered what seeds we had to implicate the grace of nothingness. And this is how hypnosis was invented, and the loveliness of paint became a mutable stimulus against the tendencies of form. 

Everything is diesel when it comes to maintaining a train of thought. Its fluidity is semiformal, which makes it ideal for drinking, proselytizing, and the glamour of doing nothing. I have often considered a poem built on nothing but antediluvian grammar to spring from its autonomy within the sentence to become a tumult of flickering eczema. And by everything, I mean anything. Anything and everything except jaundice, Mongolian grapefruit, and purgatory. These respond better to eucalyptus oil. Dry shaving on steel from any buffet will enhance the hibachi oysters. All these moods make me frown at what I acknowledge by omission. What more can I do to fortify the milk against the its chastity of its flavor? The chrome whistle demanded the innocent markings of the lotus no one ruminates in a taxi. And so we added antifreeze to its rhetoric and wept with joy by the go-go fountain.

I am so my own fog that a galaxy can frame it in buckles. This will now be my experience of you. I have an arrival in my elevator that is here for the benefit of your bloodstream. I say this out of respect for the hermitage convulsing in the ground of our reflection. That one day I felt your ensemble near me I almost spurred my endeavor to greater and greater intrigues, and came close to spitting guitars at a seeming indecision. Instead, I considered us as a gift, and held your eyes in my palette. I trembled as I dipped my brush in the goo of your sexual splendor. There are luxuries in getting here before I excel at eggnog. One of which is really just a rattlesnake shake away from being utterly inappropriate. I never fret over the thickening of a word in the wilderness of my mouth. Language isn’t just another appliance, a way to focus our calculus on parallels of salvation, but a perturbance crucial to our vertigo and a place like Bangkok to broaden our labials.