It Goes Without Saying

it’s the new year I feel like falling upside down
conversing with whirlybirds 
how funny i’ve gone this far in life without reading
Valley of the Dolls
though i did read Stoner
quite recently and learned a lot about the corruption
of academia which came as no surprise
what surprised me was the honesty
i believe that feeling can be expanded
to include my fingers
as i wait for the sun to rise in the east
i’m going to take a deep breath now and inflate
an empire of otherworldly beings
reality is mostly ice
an angel told me that
and whatever this is
because it’s words
everything you experience
is a fuchsia
 
when consciousness becomes words it
becomes a shape
and glows in a grill
charcoal plays tricks
it takes stamina
to flutter your patterns
like semaphores
of fire
they will ignite your brain
and this is called heat
the sanctity of trance
smells of romance
maybe I just need to eat more
read more
books about the transformative ores of metaphors
and the golden faucets of Venice
Vivaldi’s violins
the canals of Venice are drying up
thanks to the miasmic suck
of commerce and tourists
people say get real
I say get unreal
climb into your body
without making a sound 
 
I offer this substitute
of emotional quirkiness
because it’s sublime to feel this way
what a mess to wake up to every day
this is how the search for consciousness
is nothing more
nothing less
than a lobster wiggling its antennae
at the local aquarium
 
entanglements
happen all the time
some things are said
which have no basis
in what Kant meant
they just get said
i’m not going to argue with you
that’s not how i do things
i like to thump my chest
and swing through the jungle
releasing an ululating yodel
if space and time are the framework
within which the mind is constrained
to construct its experience of reality
who can explain the presence of gargoyles
I always know when Baudelaire is around
I smell hashish
you need music
mud can’t play a harp 
but the wind can

if this were a Vermeer
it would look like Idaho
busy doing nothing
because the brush is delicate
i take this to heart
it’s a curious medium
especially when it meanders
sounds become tangible
old brown shoes
with a whiff
of abstraction
each bristle
sparkles when it curves
into feathers and hunts
for a way into heaven
and for that i need a pair of eyes
so i can scratch my thoughts
on the sky 

Existence is a precarious business. Sinuous, convoluted, Daedalean. An old man on the English moor shaking his fist at the howling winds. Humility comes later, after the tragedies and storms. And to each individual comes a moment when the air snaps into words and starts a smorgasbord of ideas. I like ideas. And imaginary solutions, like the art of fermentation. 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, which is maddeningly elusive, like the weight of the air on a G string, and tastes like infinity. I feel better now. Consciousness bubbles along with sturgeon and catfish in its currents and some coastline in its dreams of sweet oblivion. I’m like that French kid, Rimbaud, who drifted down the Meuse on a barge in a drunken state. Except I’m much older, and drive a hard bargain when it comes to methods of overstimulation. I’m more like that other guy, Jarry, who bicycled around Paris on a stripped-down, fixed-gear Clément Luxe bicycle, often without brakes, and using pistols to clear the paths. Except I drive a Plymouth Barracuda and exercise a certain magisterial air in traffic jams, much of it involving my middle finger. Life in the 21^st century is hard. Mortality craves wisdom. But I’ll never understand money.  

My comprehension of the world has turned ugly. I see dead trees. Dark dreary days. It’s not even a matter of hope anymore, it’s a question of atmosphere. Hard to explain. I find it difficult to describe coleslaw, much less postmodernism. Since the riverbed is marshy, the afterlife is filled with a cosmic haze. It feels hospitable, and glows like a son of a bitch. I've been talking about this a lot lately. People nod sagely, then order a piroshki. Somewhere on the outer edge of a hot dog, there are moments that offer something broader to our understanding than nothing at all. Horizons, for example, which aren’t actual things, but seem like things. They’re hyperobjects, like the U.S. postal service, or Netflix. Death is a hyperobject. And so is capitalism. So are oil spills. Antibiotics. Artificial Intelligence. Murderous government thugs on slippery ice. Or the sum of all Styrofoam. Words strung together like a ball of contentious lettuce. If there are hyperobjects, might there also be miniobjects? The sound of rain clanking between your teeth. Gravity trapped in a jar of stars. It has a kind of romance to it. And a strange kind of dentistry. I just want you to know that I can feel your presence. And I’m glad you’re here. 

my anguish is sulfur
my shirt is a fine silken teal
you can do what you want
but stay off of my blue suede shoes
look how interesting a sound can be
and screams
and sirens and vowels 
i can hear a chestnut fall
and hit a car two blocks away
the haunting rhythms
of Zuni gourd rattles
allow me the pleasure
of stepping into the void
nobody owns time
nobody owns space
each sound is an atmosphere
of freely espoused implications
folds of air
so engorged with spirit
garden gnomes
hop around on pogo sticks
 

Consciousness Is Our Ocean

We prove nothing if we remain unknown, whether below or above nothing, which is soul. We have calories that our planet feeds us, or so my instinct tells me, my era, our peacocks, our frolicking in the snow, that’s it, our leverage, our redemption, our burning art, our colossal mimosas and ice age foundries, our brutal subtleties and Apache rattles, but above all our art, our brave and burning art, our capacity for caprice, our tightrope walking and crazy extravagance, our bizarre intensity and textbook dirt. A lot can hinge on a sack of good fertilizer and an acre or two of idiosyncrasy. We can say things here that might be considered extravagant in another context, but here simply means that the varnish is authentic that sings the light into being, the sheen of which can dispel the weariness caused by swaggering expectations. Therefore, I've decided to embellish the courtroom with a character on the wall of Plato's cave acting as judge. Whatever you do, don’t look at the jury. It’s up to you to decide. Is life a frontier, or an incalculable honor? A brush is the one thing that the squeamish might call a gondola, were it not for the stirrups I employ to ride a cowlick, and the clatter of investigations hooked to my belt.

If you’re thinking feathers, I'm already there. The twilight is my testament and the rebus is my paradigm. This is my photo taken in light rain. And this my photo taken in rough garments. I was a push-up then, a peeled banana raining subtleties of free will. Call it a thin Apollinaire and the rattle it takes for there to be a roar at the beginning of a movie. This is precisely what I mean by swarm. It's an eye underneath a lid of skin, swarming with yellow nails. Someone knocking on a door of muscle, and a range of hills covered in birch. Whatever is above it, it offers it, not as a battle, but a slope. This is not what it was intended to be but what it became in the process of jumping forward into the past, and suggested that I walk away from there, which is what I did, and ended up here, wherever here is. I looked around. I planted a flag. I said a prayer. I grew vegetables. And this is the way my shoulders grew wings, and found some other place to get lost.

With what I did to the window I have illustrated what a touch can do to glass. I reached for the moon and got a fondue. After all it's your party and what if your head fell off would you miss it? You might want to get ahead of it. Depth is a slap to the well-tailored, and if I've got a place to go, I get on my bike and drink the sweet morning air. For I am the we among us. The seminal demand. The sweet response. A chorus on stilts enlivening the calliope. It’s us against the one who is next to you, sipping gin. We're over there, behind that range of skillets, banging our spatulas on a juggernaut. This is what I thought it meant to walk with someone into the beyond. You find a common problem and blow air into it hoping for Switzerland to rise and float above the unintended consequences this will release. Wind comes along, and there it goes with it roots dangling down and canopy of floating alpinists, headed into a palace of pumpernickel. I had a feeling this might happen. We are, after all, what I said was over there, steam hissing out of its perforations, because it's massive and full of heat, and until we find my hat and compass, I must assume is the coastline of Ibiza. So welcome. Welcome to Ibiza. Or Reykjavik. I don’t know. I’m handing the wheel over to you now. Consciousness is our ocean, and that’s the north star.

If it is written, so be it. But if it’s not written, here come the pixels. I’m moving along now on a sort of paragraph, a place of lush surroundings with little resemblance to Monday. Or anything made of letters. We are, of course, emboldened, fragmentary, ultraviolet, since we move as a pair of figure skaters, spinning in a frenzy. And this is what letters do, when they spin their syllables into rodeos. I know what it means to put trust in a stepladder. As it happens, my personal resources are unlikely to be enough. I need a wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater and a warm, contrasting sweater. Maybe some alternatives. Vitamins. Enzymes. Trysts. There's always at least one flirt in the room who causes a sound to be there, a guffaw or a banjo. The bulbs draw attention to the back, where a grassy, ​​cracked redness is visible. That's it, our excuse for being here. It makes a sound like little bells, a rain surrounding a secret desire, orthogonal, compulsive, and improbably mink. 

  

Everything Has A Thread

It’s still raining. Flooding is rampant in the state of Washington. It's cold, too. 46℉. It's the winter solstice. 3:00 a.m., I hear a small pulse coming from my bedside radio. Satie. Gymnopédie. I fall back asleep. 8:00 a.m. I get out of bed. The world is still here. I can feel it under my feet. The carpet is soft. It signifies sanctuary and comfort. Why have hardwood floors become so popular? A renewed zeal for material prestige has encouraged a certain petulance, as if fussiness were now a sign of refinement, and actual refinement was seen as outdated as wall-to-wall carpet. This comes from my knowledge of physiology. It wasn’t handed to me. I did it by cultivating fennel. One susses things out by a kind of fumbling. Reading signs. Analyzing tusks. Deconstructing Babylon. Interpreting emotions. Footprints, fingerprints, blood, hair, semen, handwriting, chemical residue, crumpled aluminum foil, fictitious entities, nervous leprechauns, paint chips, skin cells, wet floors. Profiling DNA, CPU, FAQ, EKG, QED, TLA, TSA, FBI, CIA, R.E.M., E.L.O., LSD, NYU, WWI, WWII, ABC, NBC, NPR, and Bikers Against Dumb Drivers. Deciphering graffiti. Visiting Tahiti. Vetting Jeff Tweedy. Erecting a teepee. Scanning the cosmos for radio signals. Noting down anomalous atmospheric phenomena. Casting I Ching hexagrams. Hunting bioluminescent mushrooms in the forests of Paraguay. Studying textures as texts. Otherwise, nothing changes, the prayers for well-being continue, as does Roche Bobois. 

The journey to the afterlife has nails in it, or so I once believed. Something lurking among these words appeals to my otherworldly side. Something striking like honesty, or a kitchen stool with smooth red legs and a vinyl vivacity. Unless I move from this to that, I don't see the other side of the dark matter forming the cosmic web. I just see paint. Skin. Introversion. By what means do I launch this new idea, this new approach to language involving alchemy, despair, ecstasy, impropriety, type A plugs, T.S. Eliot, loafs of brioche, interplanetary dictionaries crackling with celestial mythologies? Language is a chameleon, and where words attempt to create a description of beauty, it gets lost in its own complexity, dissolves into coefficients of verbal bric-a-brac, and merges with the void. For nothing in this world is simply proverbial. Not if it’s made with clay and has a reason to exist. Not if it’s pink, and it’s a Tuesday, and the hardware store is open.

I have a thought beneath what I thought came from the words I put here when I wasn't looking. It's a step down from a job I held in the past, and the events surrounding it have been transformed into a story. It’s ablaze with untenable ideas and fairy tale forklifts. Do you sometimes feel like something or someone is trying to put you in a box? I’d like to help you with your problems, but I’ve got a leaky gasket and a bowl full of bills. Ever get one of those urges to throw everything away and head to the great outdoors with a biology in your destination and a dictionary in your backpack? My progress can’t be measured by pavement. It has the form of a summer and the charm of Saskatchewan. You could call it a gestalt. Or a freshly waxed pair of skis. When we is with us I can turn plural and include everything I left behind. If I was the sun up there, I’d go with my love everywhere. I would. I’m not kidding. Here’s why. I’ve got a plum in my left hand and a plume in my right hand. This would indicate a certain charm, n’est-ce pas? Something about to happen. The sly hiss of potential. This is it then. The big kahuna in my garage. The tuna comes with a motherboard and works by tilting the lumber against the wall, as you would a rawhide. Or the very fat chance of a river of words flowing inside your eyes, all the way to the ocean. Seagulls and mist. Foghorn. Lighthouse. Viriginia Woolf reading a letter.

Our movements are always directed towards the past, but the future is in the rearview mirror, which messes everything up. Traffic lights make things clear. They depend on color. The color orange is the first time anything gave me a reason to go against language both in my passion and my affinity to green, and discover its true nature, which signals me to move forward. There's an equation there that apologizes to us as if it's dealing with Wednesday and has no time for cheese sampling. Equations are like that: supercilious, perfumed, gregarious. If our logic is flawed, we pick it up and smash it against the wall. The resulting image is a waterfall of coins in a Vegas casino, bells ringing, lights flashing, jaws dropping. And this is how we get through it. How we stir the soup, as it were. I comb my hair with a munitions dump. It gives me a wild look. And that’s how I begin my day. I fold the darkness into a jewel and dangle it from a silver chain. 

It's hard to believe that there was a time in my life when I was obsessed with disco. Meaning, I hated it. But what a luxury. To let your mind drift without any intrusions from the so-called real world. The violence of the rich. The futility of the poor. The uncanny persistence of the Stones finally at an end. Arthritis. The art is right but the joints are inflamed. The bones are tired. The muscles in pain. The notes in knots. An epoch is fading into the past while a new one crawls out of the lab of some gazillionaire. If the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up. How do you digest such circumstances? With relish. With vigor. With pleasure. There’s nothing else I’d rather do than do nothing but give off a nice warm light. And sit back and examine all my tendencies and countertendencies. And do it auspiciously. As if none of it mattered. But it does, of course, on some level. Whatever level that may be. It’s probably not all that level. Because everything has a bias. And everything has a thread.

I remember the French landscape. Those two women near Alet-les-Bains who wanted to touch my hair, which was quite long at the time. It was like walking back in time to discover an existence that had not yet lost its enchantments. It was a moment that felt pleasantly carnivalesque: I had become an object of curiosity. I am who I am, but according to this principle: anything that can be thrown into the air that can advance the idea of ​​alterity is welcome. The concept of identity is notoriously ambiguous. At that moment, I was hair.  I was more than myself. I was an algebra of circumstance. The we between us. The banana is peeled, like this: a single touch can ignite the history under our skin. And a chain falls from our body.

 

Holding A Fire In My Hand

Sometimes I think the language understands me. But sometimes, I think there's something else in addition to that. Something I haven’t encountered yet. Even at my age. Which is an odd thing to say. Everything is new when you’re this old. It’s another childhood. But one in reverse. You don’t get older. You get younger. And then you disappear altogether. If the character of the phenomenon is chaotic, it’s no good giving a rational explanation for a man trapped in a dilemma of his own making. The sequence of any action will, inevitably, fall into a pattern. But this does not mean you should remove your clothes and do a dive in La Quebrada. I find myself in a difficult situation among all these possibilities, at least on paper. Call it option fatigue. And give me a drink of downgrade. It’s like lemonade. But with the tang of disgrace.

Nothing means anything. And by that I mean, anything. Nothing is anything that isn’t tied down. But since nothing cannot be tied down, nothing is tied down. The words must be choreographed, otherwise their dance will be like a needle, a thick stick of knowledge in a can of intuition. You can paint the wall whatever color you like, but if there’s a forest in the window and a finger under the soap, I would go with banana mania. If sweating becomes a recurring phenomenon, as it often does during periods of exertion, it clearly indicates a romantic temperament, while if this sample takes the form of a strip of glued paper, it will transmit a flow of music through the piano strings for as long as necessary. Here's how we do it. We begin with a handful of words arranged to mimic the dazzling sidewalks of a fabled port of call and become strollers, amblers, flaneurs, some seeking tea rooms for the peacock set, some seeking redemption in a stained-glass window.

It must be clear that I’m not in control here. I’ve never really been in control of anything. Who is? Even kings need the caressing words of sycophants and courtiers. Or powerful queens with elegant tastes and persuasive charms. All of this becomes evident, sooner or later, as to what someone has to offer when resources become scarce. While I'm next to you, let me dream, I want to know what it's like to be a sentence. Nothing is thicker than the watermark on a kettle. The meaning of this is inscribed on a grain of sand. Am I the only one to not know what it is I’m doing? There’s no point to describing Anyang, China, if I’m stuck in Seattle. Unless, of course, the underlying opportunity here comes with a mooring rope and an interesting irritation. And by opportunity, I mean river. Rivers move. They seem to know what they’re doing. They bend when it’s necessary to bend. They meander with a wizardly circumlocution, come crashing down in a thunderous volume of jubilation, deepen into silence, widen into cypress, and empty into heaven.

It's bitter cold in the car, but the relief it provides from the noise coming from the upstairs renovation project is worth it. Only my hands and my head can feel the cold. My coat keeps the rest of my body warm. The cold is unpleasant, but I can never quite understand what, precisely, makes it unpleasant. It's just a sensation. What makes one sensation feel good and another feel bad? If I decide, mentally, that there's nothing inherently wrong with the cold, but it actually feels good, then why doesn't it feel good? “O, who can hold a fire in his hand,” Bolingbroke argues in Richard III, “by thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
by bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow by thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? Oh no, the apprehension of the good gives but the greater feeling to the worse.” The same might be said of the noise that drove me to sit in the car on a cold December morning. If I think the noise is music, it won’t sound like music. John Cage was able to find music like that. Nothing was noise to him. I lack the power to do that. But I’m working on it. Some responses to the rigors of this world are not malleable, nor negotiable. Death, for example. What larger sense of this I can make also eludes me. But strangely, it does feel a little warmer.

 

How To Keep Art Alive During A Time Of Mammon

Without a single bruise, the little veil in the air helps me remember what I did. A paragraph that, in my opinion, seemed to have been written in a convoluted way, promised transparency. It's remarkable, in fact, how the radiant darkness of books helps pave the way for thought to find its own moment, its own reason for existing. Behind every vision there is a world beside it, sparkling with indecisiveness. One can hear the sand make its silent appeal to the rocks embedded in its mute sonority and welcome a fin to swim around in the punctuation bowl. This is not how most novels engage the reader. This happened before to a solitary man in Norway who wrote a book about how language defines the boundaries of our world. There is often a carpenter inside each of us, waiting for the opportunity to wield a hammer. Operate a backhoe. Build a bildungsroman of wind and snow and storms of impossible romance. Below a sky-piercing mountain, a neon light illuminates my shin, flesh against the side of a granite wall. Details shift and change. An inarticulate force must be named. And then we move on.

How to keep art alive during a time of Mamman? Art began in a cave. It has always been subterranean, a louche energy running contrary to tribal conventions. I placed this thought at the crest of one of my waves and watched what happened when the whole thing swelled into words and splashed against the curtains. It came raining down as entrails, which revealed otherworldly secrets. Haruspicy. Even as a thinker, one is still an animal. And since language is inherently hallucinatory, the source of its chimera is a sorcery of potent legacy, the calamity of existence. This is what has led us all along to take this path. Aromas of smoke using from the mouth of a cave, the meat of the real in the grip of a rapturous art. The art of the hunt. The art of the erotic. The art of myriad necessities. The art of swerves and deviations. The art of lament. The art of extravagant praise. The art of lighting a juniper wick in animal fat and painting a sleek red horse.

The emergence of consciousness allows me to discover something I didn't understand before. Which is a mind in yellow, however green and theatrical it may appear. If you build me a stage, I’ll light you a candle. We will celebrate our inglenook. My copy of Hölderlin will provide raw material for the ceremony. The ceremony of understanding. The ceremony of curling barrel staves. Being isn’t a thing but a process. It's time to begin the mutations. I abandon all groping. I prepare, as always, for ambiguity. A nearby dream grows a load of funny punctuation. If I hang England in my mind it tends to steam like an old locomotive and take thoughts around in circles. This is not the hypothesis we mapped on the page. Not at all. It’s a biography of time. When it turns infrared, it will spray itself all over the ceiling. And if it falls, we’ll put it in a basket and sing. The bubbles will amplify our pathos. The rain will offer an escape route. And the moon will awaken feelings of candor.

My mouth heals the writing on the desk. All those predicates and vowels. All those rolls and backflips. Letters that get up and walk around. I can feel it. I just know it. I’m on the fringe of something blithe and mechanical. My shirt endures the improvisations of the clouds. That has to mean something. You never know when something is about to crack its shell and come flying out in a riot of color. Sometimes a beautiful temptation drops out of the steam, and I have to go somewhere vast and entertaining to think about it. Today, I stand here gazing at the rebellion. I hold a piece of wind in my fist. I glue it to the sky with a jar of syntax. I get my sewing kit out and create simulations of control. I create a beard of slender aluminum for the priestess of guessing, and I begin to guess. Who is she? Aretha? The embroidery is laughing at a sandwich. I know it’s not Cher. Though it is dear to think so. Art will sometimes provide an ablution for this. But if it doesn’t, that’s ok. I like drawing provocative parallels between things. It can get messy and over-complicated. But who’s worried about any of these decisions? I like butter even better.

I stand among geographical details with our daughter feeling. The bologna is parallel to a blob of arms and legs. Here, we will sprinkle cinnamon on it and see if it produces a pupa. I’m in the mood for something soft. I flop on the bed with olive drift. I'm expanding my fluids to produce a romance. Look out. This a pigment about to make some letters lift it into meaning. My oboe is the architecture by which your ability to roll through the enthusiasm of this is alive and eclectic. Think of something multidimensional. The façades of Gothic cathedrals, say, or Polynesian polytopes. I have sometimes noticed that when it rains some of it comes burbling out of the mouths of gargoyles. I have employed it to represent the helter-skelter nature of things. But who needs symbols these days. The spoon holds a jingle of broken summer. Slurp it down, baby. I will combat the baldness of harmony with the caprice of the harmonica, and play it on a clarinet.

It is this continual adjustment to context where the details get lost. Nocturnes, for example. Or Gymnopédie. Anything with a pump and a whistle. A roll in the hay or a dance with a rattler. Most of life is entertaining. It’s the intervals where things get a little dicey. Like pulling into a town with no vacancies. This can be annoying and probably not very entertaining. But even this can change. It’s all about getting used to things. AI, for example. The long slow sigh of the toilet tank filling. Or the disturbing spectacle of Mathew McConaughey floating in a fifth-dimension tesseract, trying to send the quantum data from a black hole's singularity to his daughter by manipulating gravity in her childhood bedroom across different moments in time. Like it or not, we’re subject to our civilization’s ways of thinking. Incantation is decantation. And while it's a rather vague thing I’m alluding to here, the poetry is the thing, the fact of it, its unique angle, its inner gaze, its vision clear as the stars of a summer night. Or Mathew McConaughy. Now he’s in a dinghy, rowing like hell to get to the end of a sentence. I put him there. It’s my movie now. And it’s got nothing to do with singularities. It has everything to do with singularities.

The wind blew in when the door opened, and with a quick turn, shifted, and blew down the hall where a couple sat on a couch, waiting, backs to the fire, the shadows of them on the wall, against it, big black shapes there which because they were talking, they didn’t see. That’s where I come in. Smiling like a coordinate and holding a balloon. You can resemble an assembly but you can’t nail death to a boxing glove. And why would you? Part of the problem is centered here, bending over like a hypothesis. Theories are always accommodating. If they weren’t, there’d be nothing here but the smell of her perfume. Go ahead. Shout. I know you want to. Any rational and articulate entity should be given an approximation, at the very least. It’s a very fat urge that one day turns crustacean and grasps the fact of its existence with pure stimulation. And clamors over the rocks in a rage of overconfidence, considering the size of the wave, and the weight of the air. A sequence which can be followed isn’t a sequence, it’s an infinite attempt to claw the air, and pull something out that wasn’t there a moment before, when the wind was from the north.

Madame Bovary Haiku

Recently, I reread Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. I wanted to read something that teemed with fascinating details. Flaubert is a master of detail. By the end of the novel, I was feeling a little guilty by reading this book; I had the peculiar feeling that by reading it, I was reanimating all the suffering that occurs in this tragic story, the bulk of it precipitated by the monumental appetite of Emma Bovary, a yearning so outlandish, so romantic, and so sublime, that it kills her. If the book sits on the shelf unread, I feel, nobody suffers. A foolish, deeply narcissistic notion since at any one moment, and at any time of day, thousands are reading Madame Bovary. Those poor characters will never get any rest. I will, of course, read it again. It’s one of those books that gets bigger and lusher and stronger with each renewed engagement. The details help give it a Zen-like stillness, the natural serenity of objects, small, delicate things. I feel at home with them, with these details, these exquisite touches of light and filigree. And so I began making haiku out of them. Most of them occur at the beginning and midway; as I got caught up in the plot, I paid less attention to details and more attention to emotion. I’ll back another day to glean some more.

 

    satin shoes, the soles

of which yellowed from the wax

    of the parquet floor

 

  the scent of the cigar box

lining, verbena mixed with

          tobacco

 

          embroidery

on a rosewood loom, over which

     revels a woman’s curls

 

     ambassadors walking

on parquet floors, in salons

    paneled with mirrors

             restaurants

where people dine after midnight

     laughing by candlelight

 

     sighs in the moonlight

tears that flow over the hands

      that one abandons

 

         a boudoir with

silk blinds, filled planters, a bed

      mounted on a platform

 

    she picks up a book

dreaming between the lines

  and drops it on her knees

 

     playing piano   

in a red velvet dress a breeze

   wanders her motions

 

     at four o'clock

in the evening, the kerosene

    lamp has to be lit

 

  the dew had left silver

lace joining the cabbages

  with long light threads

 

   the trellis covered

with straw, the vine on the wall

  like a large sick snake

 

   when his lamp is lit

the shadow of the pharmacist

   leaning on his desk

 

  above the door of the inn

the faded old lion still shows

       its poodle curls

 

      tousled brown

hair descending her back

disappearing into shadows

 

       the gold trim

of the barometer threw shimmering

    lights on the coral

 

two swallowtail-shaped

weather vanes silhouetted

against the pale dawn

 

   the bank was slippery

clumps of watercress helped

  to keep from falling  

 

    she felt herself

vibrate as if the violins

rolled over her nerves

 

       cavatina

in G major with a solemn air

      bemoaning love

 

  Emma leaned over

scratching the velvet rim

    of her opera box

 

     and this illusion

that charmed her seemed to be

      her life itself

 

        Emma laughed

when the champagne overflowed

    the rings on her fingers

 

A Bouquet Of Dumbbells

By the end of the concert everyone’s hair is a mess. I owe my existence here to the prodigality of pins. Things I stick to the wall. Things I think in bed at night. Things that wrinkle when immersed in thought, and turn into horses. It’s a luxury related to the theory I'm working on, which is conciliatory, and cake. It's also about writing. Isn't that what I'm doing? Words exist through the life-giving force of your eyes, which are hereby summoned by my franchise to appear in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Therefore, I’m going to exonerate you of intrigue. We know there is a higher reality, and yet we immerse ourselves in this one to gain nothing but Substack. At dawn, I see wrinkles in the sandstone and wonder if there are intuitions for this kind of perception. For writing to be possible, one must develop a technique that can be used like a fairground to attract a smorgasbord of obliging anomalies, or translate congruity like a cabbage, and deliver a baby. Can you hear the heat in your teeth? Imagine setting things on fire with your saliva. These are the reveries that meet through woodbine, sometimes attracting an electric current, which explains pasta. At least, from my point of view, we allow it to happen. So I ate it.

It’s what people do when the world has lost its footing. Let it hand itself over to that radiant energy we call a tomato. Feel free to the examine the eyeball of an ancient Druid. Use whatever pronouns you feel most appropriately express your angst. Identities are household articles, bubbles of glistening abstraction. We unbutton them because they are us. We are us because we wash and iron them, and fold and put them in drawers. Exhilaration spins rapidly in a conundrum of skates.  It’s just another way of letting a language dangle from the earlobes, fulfilling the ambitions of an investment nexus called Pie in the Sky Asset Hounds. The density of prose is linked to coconut in ways that go beyond what one might think. I sculpt it. Then bottle it in weather. It’s just something I do in the privacy of my burrow. I draw sunlight from problems, and pacify my hygiene. One must comb one's hair more than once, assuming it's like sugar, and that what has been said when science turns against its own beauty, is probably seaweed.

I like the literal effects of what a fuel line can do toward starting my shoes. Little things, like ignition coils and surgery. The insoluble helps me recognize my objective, which is twinkly, and bristles with fricatives. A lot of people ask what I do for a living and I scoop an answer out of the void and say live. I live for a living. But I’m retired now. I binge on IHOP, erotic fantasies appropriate to my senility, consort with the dead, and follow whatever trends appeal to my sense of spontaneity. I am what I decided to be ever since I exploded into a thousand pieces of Holocene postcard art. But suddenly, as if from somewhere dank, someone appeared and then disappeared behind a wall of rhetoric, and I thought about those days in the machine shop, juggling dimensions in the spiritual realm. It is through this form of strategic materialization we demonstrate our resilience. The night was a kind of Lucha Libre. The darkness embraced me so tightly it hurt. A woman popped out of me in tiny prisms of thought, causing penmanship and subjectivity. A magnificent laughter, dark as sapphire and twice as denim, ejected from a dream, and I remembered what it felt like to go cycling in Yucatan, searching for cenotes, and duende. 

There by the window, erect and rhombohedral, a spirit from another dimension holds a bouquet of dumbbells. This an argument for poetry as I surge forth to cook it. This is as good a place as any to stretch our chemistry into insubordination. The juiciest allegory I have ever seen poured from a deep conviction is now a clumsy private eye adrift in a universe of lampshades. None of us meant for this to happen, but happen it did, as most things happen, flailing around for angular abstractions, things we can use to grow bivalves beneath our words, and resurrect the death of the author from a long slumber in the burgundy postulates of a postmodernist aesthetic. None of this, incidentally, is based on what I know of calculus, which is less than a little, it’s a graveyard of privilege, a giant crushed tomato obstructing the passage as soon as I arrived. After dipping my finger into the iron prose of a Romanian novel, my arms went limp when the varnish of the nipple adorning the cover cracked open, releasing a million pearls. And that’s when I discovered a new aesthetic based on balustrades, a nuclear music proclaiming the tacit symmetry of waffles.