This Is Why I Hate Paywalls

Existence begins with a sigh, a goat, and a slide down a birth canal. I want the full meaning of this sentence to disassemble itself in a centrifuge. What can we do to make this moment incandescent? This is where the hammer becomes a couplet. Stupefaction by Wi-Fi. I like to think of it as a kitchen appliance that straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition. I enjoy every opportunity I get to wield a wrench. But sometimes I feel more like Malta. The call of an interior postulation puts my focus on hold, and I turn to the window for a ride across the Rubicon. I’ve made up my mind to go warm and temperate into the tropical regions of my southern hemisphere. Experience begins with a single inhalation. And ends with a fantasy. My fingers curled around an orange. My head wrapped around a novel perspective. How do you draw the light? How do you draw space? Just space. Nothing in it. No planets. No stars. No bus depots. No diners or donors or dinosaurs. Space. And many exciting minutes later Sandra Bullock. Reaching the sandy shore. And standing up. But that’s not space. That’s moo. Nothingness. Absence. Non-being. How do you draw that? What pencil do you use? What brush? What anarchy? What piano sonata? This is just silly. All the space is between the words. Not in the words. The slide in the park was put together with syllables. And a crescent wrench.

How does one manage to put so many words together without burdening them with the world’s tedium? I want to see the energy of life on paper. I want to see syllables and morphemes click as they collect the residue of combusting metaphors. Poetry is an incendiary problem with an explosive solution. Every now and then one gets a nice clean shot on the gun range. We live in an era nebulous as a rice ball. There are no parameters or parachutes. Capitalism is kaput. Competition has been replaced by authoritarian updates, unfulfilling fulfillment centers and sternly timed bathroom visits. Do you remember what it was like to feel your life unfold in candlelight and confession with the same quality of attention as a reader feels the articulations of a book tease the mind into thought? Writing gives us the opportunity to pour the northern lights over a crust of definition, and walk away grinning like Minnesota Fats after clearing the table with a single shot. It doesn’t always work out that way. It usually goes sideways. It’s why I get a kick out of punctuation. Is there still a place for poetry under the tutelage of techno-fascism? Sublime dead authors enlighten no one in library mausoleums. Books should be as wide-spread and available as water. You can use my swimming pool until I'm insoluble, & lost in butterflies.

Life is so much better when things are within reach. This is why I hate paywalls. Everything is siloed. Privatized. Automated. Society has been atomized into YouTube shorts. Who invented the zipper? I’ll bet there’s a video on YouTube to provide that information. Shared reflections can be erratic, depending on the host. Feelings aren’t always aluminum. And anything orthogonal can be abandoned for something folded and linen. Can you show me how you were born? I’ve forgotten much of it. Things continue to lie dormant within me. Trees. Hygrometers. Skies boiling with altocumulus. In the prominence of tidepools there are ample definitions for the weave of Michaux’s sumac. I want to see it do something extraordinary. Pour polar oil on a plaster mosquito. Sometimes I feel compelled to pin a question mark on a crab. There’s a melee every moment that staggers in the timeless presence of a Helsinki coconut. Here we have a group of carpenters swarming around a sonnet. I’m not always so openly scientific. Which is to say the carpenters are real. But the sonnet is not. The sonnet has been transformed into a bloodmobile.

Yesterday I bought a sound. A gown of sound. I’m a man of elder years and chrome elephants eavesdropping on marathons of pain. I consider clothing to be sparkles of perambulation on paper, parables of lavender and gray, like the sunsets of France. The sleeves of evening may be deployed in the libraries of the soul. These are the ghosts of pool sticks, the very things of which the world is made, including all the fractured ideals following a bloody revolution. Subtleties of this sonority shake the inhibitions from my horn. It’s a funny feeling. But I’ll get used to it. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Mars. I crawled out of the world early in the game, when two tickets to a concert of frogs cost two bucks and a papal dispensation. I just come here for naps now, and a little vanishing point perspective. I keep looking at it with the old perspectives. And then it occurred to me, isn’t the need to alter one’s perceptions the sine qua non of poetry? The Norse gods are deep in their mead, howling sagas at sawdust dolls. That was the original sound. Not the new sound. The new sound is from outer space, catching fire in a Belgian dictionary.

Dostoyevsky On A Pogo Stick

Have you ever noticed how easily wires get entangled? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about these things? I do. It’s why I never get anything done. The day breaks and, further on, in the small port of Spinola, the fishermen are already bustling about on their small multicolored boats. It’s why I write poetry. You can map oblivion with propofol, or the unfiltered voice of summer rain, and still have difficulty netting certain ideas. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in The Ramones. But really. It’s so hard to convince people of anything. It’s a big problem. Especially if you have your heart set on becoming a self-help guru. I had a lifetime to do that. And look what happened. Nihilism. Nepotism. Cynicism. Emil Cioran. Is there a universal mind where one’s interior can thrive on the power of a waterfall and remain calm in the face of a plutocrat? I can’t answer that. Nobody can. I’m still stuck on these wires. Disentanglement. String Theory. Inflationary Universe Theory. The Theory of Everything. The components of life are courtesies of sunlight and dirt. You’re here as long as you’re here.

I’m fairly open to things. But there are exceptions. Genocide. Technofeudalism. Global surveillance. Centralized digital banking. Neoliberal economics. Tax cuts for the rich. Things have gotten so sordid lately. There were incidents during last night’s bingo game I’d just as soon forget. What makes the vividness of the fourth of July so spectacular and simultaneously demoralizing isn’t the fireworks but the absence of anything truly independent. And who can’t be a little amused by Musk and Trump’s little breakup? If you must break the law, said Julius Caesar, do it to seize power. In all other cases don’t slam the door so hard. I’m trying hard to keep us both in focus. Bank robberies are exciting and cathartic. But when it comes to scandalous levels of extravagance, you can’t beat the pentagon. Bubbles do pop. Carry a widget wherever you go, and observe the law as you might a great judge of character. Leonardo de Vinci. Lao-tse. Marie Curie. Gypsy Rose Lee. Johnny Rotten. Dostoyevsky on a pogo stick.

Poetry doesn’t need to be written. It just happens. The day I was born I didn’t argue with anything. Or did I? Does crying count? Frustrations begin in the crib and mount with the evolution of our needs. I will apply words to reality whether they truly apply or not because words are more interesting when they detach from reality and flit about like hummingbirds in a cage of grammar. You can build an emotion of extravagant hues around a jewel of music. But can you make a tiger prowl through a sentence filled with entanglements of vine and orchid and yet remain untethered to anything proto-utilitarian or syntactically crystallized, as in the practice of doing dishes? Why would you? I’m a glutton for polysemy. My favorite shirt is a ceaseless provocation with four hundred buttons of flaming preternatural gold and eight sleeves for each tentacle. I live like Greogry Corso, still harboring that 5,000-year-old secret behind Jack and the Beanstalk. Gogmagog. Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of a beatnik poet high on ayahuasca. 

There are infinite resources for the thickness of things, much of it rendered by the infinite resources embedded in the semantic thickness of words. My fingers squirt words all over the surface of a walnut desk. I didn’t invent this language, but I do go swimming in it occasionally. I wish people took better care of it. Which is a massively hypocritical thing to say, all things considered. I remember when correspondence meant something. You could see a mind drifting through itself, crackling like a power socket in a moon jelly exhibit. For example, that night Joan Rivers sat on my lap and told me a joke about my monkey. I got lost in Johnny’s eyes. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: noodles improve the soul's lampshade. I’m far more comfortable when I’m insoluble. I can’t just amble around in iron. I must rub things together to get sparks. Our bodies are here to propagate, but our minds like to flourish in solitude. The human brain houses approximately 86 to 100 billion neurons. What kind of solitude is that? Mending things demonstrates a kind of tenacity, but I’m not here for tenacity. I’m here for the doughnuts, as always. It gives me release. The more bites you take, the bigger the hole. 

 

A Language Isn't Just Words

A language isn’t just words it’s a way of attaining elsewhere. It’s also a way to make the heart of a palomino pump its energy and burdens into a fiction. I like to write in the sky where the clouds are folded into fingers of crackling silk. Exempted from accuracy and truth, we abandon ourselves to lingerie and ceaseless correlations. The lights of Reno, the rhetoric of sage. Consonants tumbling into mountain rain. Morphic resonance, cogitatum, apodictic evidence, introspection, intentionality. A letter from Virginia Woolf. An intriguing set of vertebrae played like a xylophone. This is how perception, rendered in gray, makes concessions toward reality. Venice in the sfumato of a late afternoon. The phosphorous glow of Pacific waves cresting on Poipu Beach in Kauai in late evening quiet with a full moon framed in a ring of noctilucent clouds. I find the sea mysterious, sublime, and terrifying. I always wonder about what’s on the bottom. Metaphysics and coral. Metaphysical snow globes. Mermaid brothels unanswered howls. An embarrassment of riches, a space of humidity and glass for the opprobrium of cactus.

Where there are trees, there are leaves and branches. Things are weirdly encompassed yet infinite in the synaptic forests of the brain. Metaphysics snows on the ganglions. Righteous glia and neurons of the mangrove register the blue vastness at the surface of the Pacific where the curvature of the planet is revealed at the horizon line. This is how perceptions puzzle the strings of the violin with a bow of prose and a sternly monitored chin. I can’t explain why I said this. My cloud flashed. It’s an orgasmic muted in deep pleasure. I can generate a wavelength of love on any train in the country so long as it’s running on good rail and sketchy intentions. One day I shall pen a biography of fog in the luminous ink of the midnight sun. I’ll do it for kicks. I’ll lure it into being with the coals of a capable etiquette, the linguistic tinsel of subjunctive collisions and cognitive dissonances. They say its easiest to run where the sand is packed hard and I find that this is true. It’s not uncommon to make the discovery of the ego’s illusions at the beach. It’s a crunchy nugget of self-awareness, like inwardly cringing during an acceptance speech.

They say we know less about the ocean than we do the other planets and stars in the universe. The same could be said about consciousness, that ocean in our head. I’m not even sure why anyone imagines it’s in the head. Some of it might be outside the head. When consciousness becomes words it lights the chandeliers with a figure of speech. And this is called heat. This is how the search for consciousness can look stupid as hell on a sheet of paper and yet ignite your brain. Memories wrapped in glittering mirrors will yank you out of life and drag you into the steam of a dream. I know a fool when I see one. The mind juggles words like a court jester. Speech is a vulnerable undertaking. You can start out with the best of intentions and find yourself looking for a napkin after blurting a confession of fraud and irony. All these things are true and happened on a mountain. Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead. Let’s not kid ourselves. No intensity goes to waste. If the shoe fits, fine. You don’t have to wear it. I walk around in existence all day doing what I can to redeem the various predicates I’ve put into play. I order what looks good. I eat it. I look around. I thank the waitress. I get up. Grab my hat. Leave a tip. Head for the door. So no. There are still delicacies. Things to assess. Things to do. Things to say. Exits and entrances. Last night I listened to Fleetwood Mac. The early days. The Peter Green days. And then I began to drift away on a black horse of desire, and let it all happen in music.

 

Members Only

I belong to it. So do you, I believe. Life. Existence. Being. It’s a big circus with acrobatic Hamlets shooting out of Danish cannons. There are challenges, and there are amenities. There is also a passage, a trajectory of stage doors and wild vagaries of immodest equivocation. It’s the same path our ancestors traveled in their quest for eclairs. And yet, for some reason, whenever we go wandering there, this whirl of syllables appears, confounding everything in its wake and turning it into folklore. We live by pom poms, big emotions, skylark kazoos and evangelistic fanatical invention. The coinages are bluntly numismatic. But I’m buying nothing from our rotating hands. If things get anarchic, we’ll start the tractor and plant some vowels in the soil. We’ll grow hearty sonnets and stunningly beautiful elegies. Corn. Beets. Radishes. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Peppers. Beans. Cilantro. Conversational implicature and subjunctive kindling.

Today, I got a newsletter from infinity. It says drift, hungry and luminous, among our planets. My breath changes the course of a stream of words and it lifts a future tense into an engine of postponed meaning. Unity, a remembered effort, burned down last night. This left us with a steady mass of canvas and a cup of sugar. I’m not against gasoline. Logic is the refuge of the handshake. You’ll find it, at times, humming a charming song on a corner of the bench. Flap your explosions towards the dangling resilience. It’ll come in handy for the pancake parade.

Are the algorithms our buddies or more like border collies? I keep a gardenia stand under the planet. Applause is concentrated in the hands. Don't look for virtuosity in a cherry orchard. If the petal doesn’t match the description, form an opinion. Never let a compliment stand in the way of your vanity. We have tinsel for the toilet and history for the negligent. You can shine like a spatula in a merchant ship. But one day your monkey is going to beg the crowd for a branch, and hand you a hyperbole. Either grow up disembodied or escape yourself. I’m not here to cause trouble. It is, in fact, my most profound desire to lift you into abstraction. Old gets old by rattling its speedometer. Essence is a process, not a yacht. But it'll get us across the border. Cubism is rooted in my ganglia. It’s got a face like an outboard on a paradox. Everywhere you look you see people anxious to get out of here. It’s up there. Top shelf of the living room. Glued to an attitude.

We worry the spirits when we talk in this vein. The melancholy soulfulness by which Lucinda Williams sings Magnolia is its equivalent in music. This adjusts how I dish the mud. Do I use words, the words of everyday life, or some other words, the words of a wedding cake ruminating on an abstraction, or David Lynch directing a miniseries? I can take an insult from nearly anyone but I cannot tolerate a too blatant eagerness to do nothing. I embody bedding. I always have a sleepy feeling. Please don’t spoil my day. I’m miles away. My homonyms heal the heels along the way. Tomorrow I’m bringing snow and evergreens to the site of a chronic remorse. The window is glazed with frost. I watch pathos stroll through a wilderness of improbable scruples. As soon as I get to the end of this sentence I’ll disappear. And reappear as a stimulus. It’s what I’ve wanted all along. A jacuzzi in the backyard. A divine destination. And a way to get there.

 

The Fossilization Of The Human Mind

I like the way The Firm opens. Everything is golden. Everything is excellent and prestigious and coming up roses. Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is a top tier Harvard graduate in law pursued hy numerous law firms. He takes a job in Memphis that offers him a monster salary. Oliver Lambert (Hal Holbrook), chief of the law firm, shows him a lot of affection. Then there’s a rooftop luncheon overlooking Memphis and the Mississippi. And things start feeling weird to Jeane Tripplehorn, who plays Cruise’s wife. She learns from a brief conversation with one of the other wives that it’s not forbidden for the wife to have a job. And they encourage having children, because children promote stability. Things start escalating from there. Bar by bar by bar a cage forms around the couple. The big turning point comes [spoiler alert] when McDeere is sitting at a booth in a café trying to eat while studying for the bar exam. The fact he isn’t home and is having dinner in a café, surrounded by piles of books and notebooks, illustrates the pressure he’s been under and the strains beginning to appear in his marriage. FBI agent Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris) and Thomas Richie (Paul Caldéron) come swaggering in and sit at a nearby table. They playfully drop some hints that gradually reveal that they know about McDeere and the law firm he works for, which is steeped in corruption. They firmly and persuasively convince him to meet with a higher official in Washington DC, by the Lincoln Memorial. Which he does. And he is told that if he cooperates with the FBI he won’t go to jail, but his career as a lawyer will be over. In the gathering of evidence, he will – by default – be breaking his oath of confidentiality. He and his wife will also need to go into a witness protection program, his dreams of pursuing a career in law utterly and irretrievably shattered.

The Firm is a dramatization of personal asphyxiation. The American Dream turned abject nightmare. Which is what has been happening in real life over the last several decades.

It's a terrible feeling. Dank, dreary, dungeon-like. Eerily similar, in fact, to a feeling I get related to our current political situation. Not just Trump, but one that’s been building over the last few decades, beginning with Reagan. The discovery that the country is steeped in so much corruption, so much aggressive surveillance, so much police state militarization, so much psychopathic greed and inhumane treatment of the poor and vulnerable, that escape seems impossible. It would take the genius of a Houdini to wrest free of the regimented lives people are now forced to inhabit like prisoners in a minimum-security Federal Prison Camp. Right now, the people who feel it most are poor, people with barely enough money in reserve to cover an emergency room visit. People blessed with higher incomes might not feel it at all yet, even when they see videos of thugs kidnapping people right off the street and deporting them to a CECOT prison in El Salvador.

The places that frighten me most right now are grocery stores, and Top Pot Doughnuts. The self-checkout aisles are trying to nudge us away from cash by reducing the number of stands that accept cash payment. Top Pot Doughnuts – at least the one in our neighborhood, which has recently closed – refused to accept cash altogether. I took offense to this. I stopped giving them my business. Boycotting them wasn’t easy. I love jelly doughnuts. Why is this? Not why do I love jelly doughnuts. I know why I love jelly doughnuts. They’re delicious. They’re palpable evidence that the universe is quintessentially benign. No. My question is more sociopolitical in nature. Why are certain businesses refusing cash? Is it because of Covid? Is it because of cooties? It makes no sense. It’s just paper. Though actually it’s not. It’s 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. But that’s not the point. The point is despotism. Rumblings in the media conjecture the end of cash and the launching of a social credit system. This maneuver would be final nail in the coffin of anything resembling free speech, or privacy or individual agency, and the institution of a totally totalitarian state of social control.

Catherine Austin Fitts, an investment banker and former public official who served as United States Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing during the presidency of H.W. Bush, warns that a digital concentration camp is posing a real threat in the behind-the-scenes machinations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. “A complete re-engineering of the U.S. government through the digital systems is now possible at high speed,” she writes in her blog the Solari Report. “A digital control grid is an electronic network of telecommunication and information systems that allows individuals to be surveilled, tracked, and made subject to invasive controls applied to their financial transactions and resource use (such as electricity, food, water, transportation),” she writes, “compromising, if not ending, all human rights and liberties. Control grids operate with significant data collection and AI to apply social credit systems that can be dictated on a highly centralized basis. A digital control grid ends financial freedom, replacing markets with technocracy – a system run by rules created by ‘experts.’”

This is what happened to the truckers in Canada when - in early 2022 - the truckers organized a protest known as the Freedom Convoy, initially against a vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers requiring them to be vaccinated before being allowed to cross the U.S.-Canada border, and Justin Trudeau responded by invoking the Emergencies Act and blocking access to their bank accounts.

The implications of this are terrifying. One could feasibly be debanked simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a protest against the official government narrative, and there you are, exiting a drugstore and exposing oneself to the biometric examination of a street camera, or – after enjoying a glass or two of wine after dinner – posting, on impulse, a provocative political statement or voicing a raw reaction on social media that might be interpreted as “hate speech.”

This would effectively end free speech altogether and have a chilling effect on public – and private – discourse. Imagine you’re a parent and you give your son or daughter a birthday party and one of their friends overhears an untoward statement between you and your partner that gets reported to their parents, then reported to the authorities, and the next morning at the grocery store you discover your bank account has been frozen. Or you buy a book on Amazon that goes contrary to the official government narrative. Or your produce a documentary about the atrocities of a foreign government that our government is friendly with, and making huge profits from the sale of weaponry. The documentary is quite successful and wins prestigious awards, at least in other countries. Like the César Award in France, for example. You’re suddenly rich. But you can’t access your money. You’ve been naughty. The government is calling you a terrorist, and your account is frozen.

Thought, creativity, spontaneity, vision, inspiration, expressivity, conjecture and conviction go down the drain. Life – or whatever is left of life – is conducted in an open-air prison in which every word is weighed carefully before being uttered. In which every purchase is carefully considered. In which you’re mandated to submit to a medical procedure despite the recommendations of your doctor or your own suspicions about the inherent dangers of a deviously conceived and poorly researched vaccine. So you refuse. And are debanked. Canceled. Ostracized. Quarantined on a compound in Greenland. And jabbed every six months.

Catherine Austin Fitts remains hopeful that the totalitarian juggernaut being assembled in the secluded corridors of the digitized cybersphere can be stopped. One immediate action to take is to boycott enterprises that forbid cash. Another is to get word out. There will be conveniences to a social credit system, such as paying for things effortlessly, with the blink of an eye or the touch of a finger, that will be used to lure the public into its net. Look how easily the public has been roped into doing the work of a cashier after the onerous chore of grocery shopping. Not to mention the atomization of the agora; for some elderly people, whose friends and family have all died or been estranged by some feud or grudge, a brief chat with a bank teller or grocery checker may be the only opportunity to exchange a few friendly words with someone. There was a checker at one of our local grocery stores who sang everything he rang up, like the people in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “How are you, I’m doing fine, bananas are on sale this week, and strawberries and blueberries and raspberries and blackberries are $2.99 a pound.” Don’t let a self-check rob you of that. Or a centralized banking system control what you choose to eat.

The biggest enemy is apathy. A public that would prefer handing in an essay or article written by ChatGPT than endure the frustrations and work of writing something themselves. I won’t lie. Writing is hard. I’ve been doing it for years and only rarely does it come flowing out of me in sparkling rivulets of prose. It’s wonderful when that happens. I feel like a sorcerer. A wizard, like Shakespeare’s Prospero. It’s an intoxication. The struggles, too, are enrichening. It’s galvanizing to wrestle an inchoate idea into a vividness of being. Language is a wonderful but maddening medium. I agree with Wittgenstein: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Language is muscular. Syntax and grammar and vocabulary and phrasing and juxtaposition are muscles. The more you use them the stronger they become. The reverse is also true; the less you exercise these elements the quicker they atrophy. The mind grows increasingly vacant. It seeks fodder in distraction, which is low in vitamin D and protein, and withers into the spongy decomposition of a bog. This isn’t just a danger for laying the foundations for a totalitarian social credit system, but the death of spirit, the fossilization of imagination.

I’m a pessimist by nature, so I’m not as hopeful as Catherine Austin Fitts. But I have seen it happen. By ‘it,’ I mean revolution. An entire paradigm shift that seemingly happened overnight. The difference between 1962 and 1964 was gigantic. I’ve seen people who were once shy and retiring and bore all the trappings of what people once called responsible and mature, turn into Bohemian rebels flamboyant as Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and as outrageously Blakean and headstrong as Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth. You never really know what people are capable of. What’s churning inside them. What’s aching for release.

The Firm was made some 32 years ago. The level of corruption wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. Nor was the surveillance. It was pretty sophisticated, but it wasn’t as commonplace or sophisticated as social media monitoring or data mining or fitness trackers or drone surveillance. Movies once shaped public opinion. They were powerful influences. Now they’re as passé and sad as the Oscars. People don’t even go to the movies anymore. Or read books. They scroll. They gaze at pixels. They watch podcasts algorithmically tailored to meet their specific views of how the world is put together. It’s virtually impossible to find a consensus on anything. You would think that this must, then, be a very cosmopolitan time full of open-minded savants. But it’s not. It’s tribal. It’s electronic. It’s a dumbed-down cyclotron of overworked, overfed, overstimulated, supercharged zombies who have ceased paying attention to the wars and genocide and rising seas and temperatures and growing homeless populations and are still learning how to cope with the anguish burning a hole in their soul. The Great American Novel has imploded into Augmented Reality. Philosophy has been superseded by video games like Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft and League of Legends. The last Tom Cruise movie I saw was Top Gun: Maverick. It was surprisingly good. Nobody looks cooler than Cruise in a Super Hornet.

Money has assumed many different forms over the millennia. Cattle, salt, feathers, hides, shells, coconuts, butter, whale teeth, cocoa seeds, tobacco leaves. Money is a form of language. Its current manifestation as digital currency – bitcoin, or cryptocurrency – underlies its true nature as a transactional abstraction – is as fascinating as it is potentially dangerous. People get caught in abstractions all the time. We call them ‘isms.’ Fascism. Captialism. Communism. Anarchism. One thing you don’t want is a systematized and centralized authority like the Wizard of Oz in control of how one chooses to live or chooses to believe. If you’re lucky, you might one day come upon a yellow brick road and a cowardly lion, a brainless scarecrow and a hollow tin man for companions, and through a combination of persistence and accident you might get a shot at entering the Palace of Oz and flipping the curtain back to reveal a quirky old man pulling the levers of power like a maniac high on ecstasy and ketamine. But really, it’s easier in the long run not to let things get to that point. Next time you go looking for a pastry, or a checker at the local grocery, insist on paying cash.

 

The True Cost Of Equivocation

The mind, following its usual course which advances by digressions, turning once in one direction, the next time in the opposite direction, finds itself – out of sheer exhaustion - adrift in an equatorial latitude, a boundless domain at zero degrees, and with nothing to confine it, revels in imaginary solutions and improbable novelties. Parallels spurt cognitive butter. Analogies percolate implications. Tropical anecdotes threaten the assumptions of civilization. Or what is assumed to be civilized. Or halfway sane. Or open to novel suppositories. Supernatural interventions. André Breton - bedazzled by euphorbia in the Canary Islands – checks his compass for loose change. Directions tend to collapse under the weight of the mountains. Goats on a wall of granite. Veins of silver, arteries of gold. Amber before the heft of prophecy transcendentally alters it to epitome. Is there an alchemist in the room? Why are legal documents always so hard to read? The language is so archaic you can hear it ferment. There should be a law against law. But if there are going to be laws the laws should make sense. And be consistent. Leave inconsistency to the mad. The chronically speculative. The roar of a minotaur echoing in a labyrinth. The maddening canter of multiple choice. The commitment to saying something provocative and weird. The final decision. The jubilant choice. I’ll throw caution to the wind, and pin my equivocation there, on the ass of an assertion, and say where there is sediment there is sentiment, and where there are roses, there are thorns, and where there is dirt, there is digging. The crunching of leaves, the breaking of twigs. Cracks in a fencepost. Frets on a neck.

Backyard Aporia

Stars and stripes are Willy DeVille when he was bubbly. He quickly learned to resolve the clairvoyance of clothing. Do all explorations begin like this? The frozen light of blue diamond dawns brings cactus and ironweed to mind. Old mines. Deep wells. Jesus fasting in the desert forty days and forty nights to be tempted by the devil. Nobody goes to Des Moines to be tempted by the devil. The devil doesn’t live there. The devil lives in Chicago. Or used to. I don’t where he lives. Probably lives like one of those multibillionaires with yachts the size of Guam. But I have to ask: when was luck ever an option? My soliloquies are all worn and floppy, the laces all squiggly, and all that is fair and rational well out of reach. It’s another typical day on Earth. Petula Clark singing Downtown in a subway. Willy DeVille in the Dordogne. The last time I felt this literal I was swinging from vine to vine at the San Diego Zoo. This gave suppleness and meaning to my metaphors, which I squandered on the weather. Silly me. And I had a dog named Talk who never talked. If I rang a little bell he’d get up on his hind legs and strut around imitating Liechtenstein. I will rise now and go to Innisfree. If you think pink is fun you should try applying vowels to the soft vaginal folds of a lingual franca. The implications speak for themselves.

My salt is crammed with elegies to Euclid's eyelid. There are alluring subtleties almost impossible to convey with mathematical thoughts that languish in the hallway closet. I’m not sure interior angles are what’s needed now. I want straw, and leisure, and girl scout cookies. Does this make me a barn? The middle name of profit is garbage. And it smells like hell. We are the arbiters of yellow. What we say and do is yellow. But what we think is often blue. I can’t account for that. The best way to protect a new meaning is to spend an entire afternoon doing nothing but gazing at the words lush, leafy, and by appointment only. Step two is to believe the spoon to be more sublime than napkins. Pull a rapier from its sheath. And slash a big fat Z into the back of a rococo armchair. Do it for the sake of rockabilly antimatter. For liberty and justice and dreams of swashbuckling gallantry. Like that day in Paris, July, 1789, when I first met retribution, and squirrelly urges and nostrils dilating with the scent of revolt, and how it might be used to express a library of fugitive sensations and the spirit of a golden improbability.

We find doors in graves. Places of allegory. And rock.

Without a third eye, everything in existence looks like a bathtub. Ideally, I’d like to do without a house or a car. But wouldn't it be more accurate to say what drugs to take, what shamans to look for? The vanishing point perspective is free to talk to people. About anything. Dogwood seeds in a city park. The whole point of poetry. Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. That’s it. That’s what I need. New insects. New vegetables. Whole new madrigals of deliciously wet pennies when a woman smiles. The ghost of her Cretaceous leaves rustling in the parlor of Emily Dickinson. Wild Bill Hickok creasing fillets of time into asymmetries of willow. It’s not really a question of linguistic grooves. It’s more like things stacked, one by one, on a plank of pine. This is how it is on Planet Earth in the 21^st century. The likelihood of abduction by aliens from space always leaves us with a trace of the burlesque. The butt of a joke suddenly awakens the Norse gods, and the water moves catlike to the shore, teeming with designation. I’ve seen consciousness squirm in the mind of a black mamba. But that’s just tomfoolery. Consciousness may be found at the edge of a river, or wild in a backyard aporia. One thing to look for: archetypes. And secondly, carbon dioxide. May the sky be merciful tonight. And float in space. With us on it. And all these words, which I planted here, to warm them into life, and meaning.