Pearls And Flywheels

Are we going to be remembered? And who do I mean by we? I like it when people ask what kind of animal I’d like to be. Because I’m already an animal. I’ve got eight legs, a public address system, and a mustache like Groucho Marx. Therefore, I’m qualified to raise worms. On a worm ranch. In Wormely, Hertfordshire, Sussex. That’s correct. I’m a rootin-tootin-wormboy and this is a wide-open prairie. At least until I fill it with words. And give an address on a public address system. Because I’m an animal. It’s what animals do. We stick together and sing songs and ring bells. We pick out cards for birthdays and Christmas. We lift boxes and squirt DNA at sadly pummeled walls. We forgive our faux pas with silence and rumination. We offer our hands when a hand is necessary and the theater is full of applause. We ponder swamps with inquietude and philosophy. We go down rivers in inflatable narrations. We gird our loins and walk into the fog of city council meetings and parliamentary debates. We shine a light into the dark. We write books. We make movies. We wipe the splatter of soap from our mirrors. And wonder who belongs to the face looking back at us from the other side. The other side of what? The other side of ourselves. Which is a stew of whoever. And smells like teen spirit. And lavender and percussion and wine. And Keith Richards at 48.

Writers, said Anthony Burgess on a TV talk show, are people who can’t do anything else. I find that relatable. Debatable, yes, but also inflatable. I can inflate this distinction into an inflatable dinghy. Don’t ask me to fix the flush valve on a toilet. Wait on tables. Install an electrical panel. Manage livestock. Sell hot dogs at a sports event. Don’t. Can’t do it. Here’s what I can do: put words together. It’s not really the kind of skill you learn in a high school workshop. It’s not like working on cars. Though it is, a bit, when you think about it. William Carlos Wiliams referred to poetry as a small (or large) machine made of words. I find that relatable, as well. And lacrimal and affable because why the hell not. It’s not a bad life. Not if there’s a literate public around with a few extra bucks to buy a book and a few extra minutes to read it. We don’t have that luxury now. I’m more like a horticulturist of rare tropical flowers. I press a word into the soil of my brain and wait for it crack open and blossom into a caterwaul, or a lopsided mechanical discharge of smoke and mirrors and a chorus of sexy predicates creating grammar.

I generally trade in things I can't actually own, which makes everything vague and Mallarméan. It’s not a strategy calculated to draw a big audience. It's more like what happens when things splatter while roasting a heartache a bit too close to the window. The idea isn't to love it; the idea is to create pearls and flywheels through observation. To ensure everything works smoothly by the time the jewelry is finished. If my calculations are correct, the cat should be wagging her tail by now. It’s always promising when something alive happens in a sentence. The lights go on, the radio murmurs something cool and sad in the background, and a certain faint pulse begins to make the syllables wiggle into place and start blinking on and off. If I’m ever visited by an apparition imbued with depth, I mark the occasion with a blue ribbon tied to a bone at the end of the sentence. The image helps me find a radio station tattooed to my forehead like a jar of mustard, and if it enables me to see stars I know there is a redemption among my pleasures. This is how writing enables itself now. It bends the air into clothing, which is revealed in dance and exhilaration. There’s a universe in my sock that nobody has seen, and if sheer necessity unites this discrepancy in a net of syllables, the mind shoves it about until it becomes an anatomy of skin and defiance, and the results are witnessed as quail.    

 

That Feeling Of Being Drawn

I often find myself drawn toward something I don’t understand, be it a novel, a scuffle in the street, or the way a woman carries herself in the rain. I'm a glutton for mystery. The greater the mystery, the greater the appetite. The vagaries of time, the history of the harpsichord, the excitement people find in sports, to name a few. The answer to the greatest mystery of all will be waiting for me at the end of my life. A not insubstantial number of my family and friends have already discovered it. None of them, as yet, have chosen to share it with me. That might be part of the answer right there. Could be there’s nothing on the other side except the silence of the void. Those little particles that keep popping in and out of existence aren’t people. They’re momentary fluctuations, mathematical constructs that pop up during interactions with a zero-point state, not physical entities. Their shimmer is the shimmer of uncertainty. The momentum of interaction. The generative force of collision. The hard sugar of regret. The buzz of a gin fizz. La Dolce Vita.  Mulholland Drive. These are qualia. They’re not things. They’re what gives mystery its tingle. And life a reason to keep living. Things are for the vulgar. Qualia are for poets, early morning mist, midnight trysts, and private dicks.

Like most people, I’m a man of many modes. My morning mode is hygienic, conducted gingerly, and slow. My early afternoon mode is volatile, demonstrative, and cinematic. In fantasy mode, my various predications pack a punch. I can reach across the border that separates the marsh from the coconut grove. What this means for the health of my garret cannot be assessed by mere extravagance. There must also be conviction. I have to believe that there are holes in time and that space is essentially a mailbox for the letters of remembrance and the shoes of expedition. What my instincts tell me is charmingly hypnotic. And sometimes I can feel the authority of the reader hover over my words like a hummingbird seeking a pollen I can only provide by inducing a sociable incandescence. This requires drugs and a capacitance based on trespassing. Therefore, I write for myself and toolbars. I need to forget what I’m doing here in the first place. Go somewhere legendary for its lack of credibility. Deep beneath the dance floor, there is a swirl of criticisms I need to overlook. And then arise in a ball of fire spitting epithets into the wind. 

Objects dangling from a doorknob. Sacks. Seemingly empty. Not unlike the sack between a man’s legs, at age 92. The fingers curl nicely around the knob, either to pull the door open, or close it gently to drown a sound. Exhaustion finds comfort in this room. A bed, a Korean radio, and a woman standing, naked, in a hotel room in Nice, holding a bath towel while staring at a vase of flowers, painted by Matisse in 1921. The colors are muted so that they harmonize and make the warmth of the room apparent to the skin as well as to the eyes. Dejection has no place here, and is rejected by a projected ease, and the feeling of a room with the door closed and the window obscured by sunlight. That's what I'm pushing for. A universal given, and letting the sky walk in. It all unfolds when it dreams itself into a privacy this vast.

Where - or what - do we come from? Mud? Lightning? Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur? A passing comet? A one-night stand with a throbbing pulsar? A beefcake God touching an outstretched index finger? Abiogenesis, hypogenesis, pathogenesis? Divine spark? Hot cosmic mama? A roadside gift shop operated by a hearty woman named Rugby Smith? The sparkle of a starlit lake and a pair of horny toads coupling on a warm Mesozoic night? Spittle of a musician in a microphone in a parallel universe where grunge guitarists emerge from a polyphonic bitterness to become something like the Manananggal of Philippine legend, a self-segmenting vampire creature capable of separating its torso and sprouting bat-like wings to hunt, go for a spin, or play “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” on a black Stratocaster? I don’t know. Goop. My money’s on goop. Blue goop. Red goop. Green goop. Something high up and plum-colored reposing on a cloud.

I think we come from language. Our species, that is, our particular adaptation, which doesn’t seem to be adapting well, not adapting well at all, no sir. We’re in trouble. So how is it, being this dumb, we come from language? Does the mouth have an aptitude far above that of the brain in its shell of bone? Language flows through us like water. Like air. Like fairy breath. Like an alternating current. Think of a still life. Not a still water. Not a mint condition dime. Not a parable. Not a TV. Not a smartphone. A still life. Cat on a ray knife blade under a tablecloth the handle sticking out. The flow is imaginary, and yet real. Those occasions in which the imaginary and the actual are hybrid dynamics, are a pure caring, a blessing. A breakthrough. What do we call things with no mass or substance of any kind? Ideas, thoughts, feelings. Light and heat and sound waves. Mackerel, glassware, a loaf of bread and lemons on a table with a white cloth by Anne Vallayer-Coster, court painter to Marie Antoinette. Until, you know, things went sideways, and things got weird and bloody. In other words, language. The language of revolution. The language of romance. The language of puppets and moisture and Angora goats. They’re all the same. And yet quite different. Did I say that or did language say that? Nothing destines a language to be the instrument of precision, nor the playground of fools. There are words that anchor the mind and words that launch the mind. I go for words that allow for wide margins and hairpin turns. But that’s just me. It’s not my language. I don’t own any of it. It’s free as a lark. This is not my writing this is the writing's writing. All I remember is cats. Some department store mannequins. And a radio playing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

If the dreamer has at least one ear, the song will be neon and the window will diet on girlfriends. We happen so fast to ourselves that the flannel is brushing against our beards. Space feels eventual. Time feels bronze. The knot feels knotted and the driftwood feels inconclusive. This may be the first time we’ve been like this, visceral and raw and textually instinctive. Because the story keeps collapsing, and the theme at the heart of the thing is now an active pulse in the surgeon’s hands. We’re on automatic drive now. Anything can happen. The sentence may grow a judiciary and collapse under the weight of its corruption, or twirl its blades and rise from the page like a controversy ablaze with speculation. There’s a chair at your embassy awaiting your empathy. Grab it while you can. The world is on fire. Time to make sure our shoelaces are tied and there’s enough gas in the tank to get us to the next garage. Google can’t help us. We’ll need the ancient tools of tolerance, and the silliness and the willingness of trying to keep it altogether by keeping it all apart. 

And so it is I stand within my senses, looking outward, looking inward, intending nectar. Row, row, row your boat, life is but a dream. I always liked that song. I can imagine Mallarmé rowing in a flat-bottomed boat on the lily pond at Giverny “with a clean, sweeping, drowsy motion,” or Rilke somewhere on the Rhine, “I think, drifting past, I heard some frightening words.” There’s the sense of an unknown sadness upon the water, a feeling of transformation, a green fluidity, a river boat with a spine-shaped keel, and a shadow falling upon the hip of a water nymph. Drifting on a lake is different than drifting on a river. Lakes are static. Rivers are in constant movement. We go where the river goes. My attention follows the movement of the sentence as it drifts into uncharted waters, tributaries making it wider and deeper, and adding to its jewelry the haze of confusion. The craze for a new grammar is just now becoming kaleidoscopical. We feel it in our nerves, and give it our best guarantee that the folklore surrounding these imputations are each a codicil of cunning and elasticity, because if we don’t where are we? I have no idea, but I'm on my way there now for a few words I can squeeze into accidents.

 

An Awkward Moment At The Good Place

Last Sunday the high reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit. R and I decided to go for a run on the pedestrian trail of the newly renovated Myrtle Edwards and Centennial Park. You can’t really tell the difference between the two parks, but while Myrtle Edwards is maintained by the City of Seattle and Centennial Park is maintained by the Port of Seattle. As soon as we stepped outside, felt the heat. It impacted the skin with an almost physical feeling. Heat like this is rare in Seattle. Normally the summer air is balmy, not hot, warm enough to get by with a T-shirt, but you might want to keep a shirt or a cardigan nearby if you plan on dining on someone’s backyard patio.

We crossed the Seattle fairgrounds and exited on Sue Bird Court North. A line of cars with the FIFA logo were parked at the curb and were pulling away in a synchronized and orderly fashion. One of the cars had its windows down and the driver hollered to Roberta if she wanted some water. She went over to the car and the driver handed her two bottles of water, free. I left home with a bottle of water holstered at my hip, but the extra two would no doubt get consumed rather quickly.

We felt the air cool noticeably as we approached Puget Sound, but the heat was still quite evident. I didn’t see any seagulls, which is quite unusual. The only birds we saw were the bird deterrents – hawklike scarecrows on high flexible poles that wobble around – planted in all the areas where lawns had been seeded with new grass.

Eliott Bay Connections, the contractor who renovated the two parks for a payment of 56 million dollars, did a good job. It was much more attractive and had a lot more amenities and the landscaping had been done with an eye toward a thriving ecology native to the region. This included native plants such as tufted hair grass, holly-leaved mahonia, snowberry and evergreen huckleberry, pollinator meadows and 12,000 trees, including twisted pine, red alder, Sitka spruce, black cottonwood and the Patmore ash. There are multiple sites equipped with wooden benches for viewing a sunset or a misty ultramarine morning with sparkly waves and a few whitecaps.

A significant new addition is the cedar-clad public amenities pavilion, baptized haʔłali (pronounced hah-THLAH-Lee), a Lushootseed word meaning “The Good Place.” It included a little Scandinavian café, equipped with outdoor benches and picnic tables, some public bathrooms, a spot where joggers and bicyclists can replenish their water bottles, and a couple of drinking fountains.

Unfortunately, the bathrooms are gender free. Meaning men and women and anyone in-between are free to share the facilities. I’m entirely uncomfortable with this assignation. I miss the convenience of urinals and the ability to swing in and out of a men’s room without having to touch anything. Other than myself, of course. I’m also intensely uncomfortable relieving my body of its waste within easy whispering distance of a completely strange woman. I feel embarrassed around men much less women. The stalls are all quite private and have lockable doors, but a panel wall won’t stop the various sounds emerging from one’s evacuations.

I went to hang my holster with the bottle of water on a hook attached to the inner door and the bottle fell out and hit the floor. Shit, I said. What now? It’s important to know that I’m OCD. I have contamination fears. A water bottle dropped on a bathroom floor is catastrophic.

Normally, in any public rest room, I freeze. No matter how badly I have to go, if I’m lacking privacy and feeling uncomfortable, my body will freeze. My bladder will shut tight as a high-resistance bolt on a railroad bridge. I have to turn therapist and coax my bladder into releasing its pressure-building fluid. Compounding my problem is an over-sized prostate. The medical term - Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia – which refers to a non-cancerous (benign) increase in the number of cells in the prostate gland, which surrounds and squeezes – blocks - the urethra.

And yet I did. I let it go. That problem solved, I emerged from my stall to tell my wife (after my initial shock of finding her in a men’s room, which was no longer a men’s room, but an everyone’s room) that I dropped the water bottle on the floor and wasn’t sure how to handle this problem. “I just mopped the floor,” shouted the attendant, a Hispanic middle-aged woman in a yellow vest seated by the wall. “Thank you,” I shouted back, “that’s good to hear.” The next thing I said seemed to burst out of me of its own volition. “I hate these gender-free bathrooms,” I said. She looked surprised, of course. “Imagine,” I said, hoping to ease the tension I’d just created, “you’re on a very special date.” R, who was just then taking the precaution of washing the water bottle at the sink, gave me an amused look. She knew what was coming. “And you and your very special date have just eaten a dinner of spicy seafood, which, some minutes later, is raising hell in your digestive systems. And now here you are in adjacent bathroom stalls, producing a veritable symphony of profoundly embarrassing and disgusting primordial noises, great borborygmic gurgles and burbles of serious biological waste. Will you even have the courage to face your date after this?” The attendant, being someone with a good sense of humor, laughed heartily at this. “My wife and I,” I threw in for good measure, “have been married 31 years. She’s heard every possible noise my body can make.” And she laughed all the harder.

 

 

So What

Here’s a drink for anyone dropping the needle on Miles. So What. I call it a coconut éclair. I pour in a boomerang of failure, sprinkle it with a trivial faux pas and add a pinch of destination. It excites the nerves and corkscrews the drudgery of pantomime. Here’s my bio: I’ve got three arms, five legs, twelve hundred prescriptions, thirteen faucets, a gruff exterior, a presumptuous magnetism, a small rebellion in my left eye, a keen sense of weightlessness and an array of exotic genitalia. My first name gave up on me and got a job with a suffix in Sussex who coughs up nearsighted reindeer whenever it ovulates. I enjoy writing letters to little towns in Florida. I like hopping around on a pogo stick when the weather gets fidgety and licking postage stamps whenever I’m feeling beige. Drink up, my friend. Tomorrow may be too late to mop our brows with regret. I see a cherub who sees what we already know, which is conveniently reversable, and upholstered with a foamy commiseration. I want you to feel tactical. Look east and you’ll see a surge of duration. Look west and you’ll see a garage dying in its own didacticism. Look north and you’ll see freakish display of eczema. Look south and you’ll see yours truly, fishing for goodwill in a pool of disavowal. This is a perplexing point for some, but for others a simple doxology of larks in a sultry Alabama quatrain.

Forbidden Things

Truth was for my parents primordial and spiritually dangerous. The Gnosis, like Eden and the Original Creation Itself, had once been perfect and complete – a simple sentence – “good” as Genesis testifies. But Gnosis, Eden and Creation, the very Word, had been lost in a Fall from Grace that we know as knowledge. The sentence, no longer simple, grows apprehensive of a duplicity. It covers what it is about to say. It rationalizes. It qualifies itself. Noah becomes drunk and bewildered from the fruit of that vine and threatens to say forbidden things.

-                 -       Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth

 

The spirits surrounding us are anomalies of the space-time continuum and are, consequently, highly insidious. They get into everything, especially my breath, and stream into being as words. They hunger for attention. They glide around everyone's nervous system causing garlic and flowers. I hear some of them now, buzzing around my head like French hotels. You'd think they'd have better things to do. They’re exhausting. I want to be rid of them. I want to be more like our cat, and sit and stare at nothing, at the air, at whatever subtleties ornament the invisible realms. Yet these fairies and flashes of lightning, while evoking a certain poetic feeling, also stir in me a desire to lead a new life, something more allegorical, more abstract and ethereal, and their contradictory nature makes that break easier for me.

Proust was fascinated by the names of places. They appealed strongly to his imagination. So that, when he encountered the actual, place he felt disappointment. The reality never matched the power of his imagination. And this is what language does. This is the fever of language. The mood sometimes goes against the season in which one is having fun, and is called an emotional dissonance. It sometimes spills out of the mouth, looking a little opaque, until it gets some traction, and finds its parallels in the local uncertainties. Intensities of pitch and tempo mount the walls of our prison and drop like bliss on the dry hot ground. Some few years ago, enchantments came easy. What happened? Deep in the caverns of the afterlife, Thoth weighs the hearts of the dead against the feather of truth. It wasn’t language that failed us. It was indifference. And all the dead predicates of a lost synecdoche.

A sentence dreams like a plum branch reaching for the green-sauce sky. It creates a fin like a magnificent cathedral. It combs itself with my bones. The arena of its schemes projects an almanac of fire. So we think of sperm as the fluid of propagation and the semantic nest as the divine warmth of meaning. We don’t have to shoulder all of it at once. We may inhabit a capital structure of Gideon chrome that supports a monumental sugar bear broom, and believe it to be a marvel of Gnostic syntax. Nowhere is it stated that a prayer is equivalent to a bucket of nitroglycerin. And yet it sometimes makes sense to mount a creditable foreground against the ominous grays of a dispassionate plot. A sudden explosion will awaken the mind to its investment in a Ferris wheel. Remember that scene in Rumble Fish when The Motorcycle Boy takes Cassandra to the fairgrounds? I don’t. Not really. My memory’s pretty vague. But somehow it’s important to me. Look. See this? This is a bulb without a corresponding narrative. It illumines the room. That’s it. Which makes it a simple sentence. Like a broken woman on a Ferris Wheel.

In the Yoruba religion of West Africa, priests and practitioners perform incantations alongside herbal remedies that are believed to catalyze healing, offer protection, alter situations, or influence the elements. Incantations invoking the palm frond solicit the rustle of its leaves as they’re animated by wind to obtain swift answers to problems. The rustle of its leaves is seen as the voice of ancestors and Orisha, the deity of iron and clearing paths. I see in Diane di Prima’s Rant a similar invocation of power, an appeal to the human imagination to resist the onslaughts of conformity and predatory aspects of industry and science, “a multidimensional chess which is divination and strategy: the war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” We invoke the oversoul. The power of the void. Interconnection. Flux. The revolution of everyday life. The influence of the immaterial, which is the caress of stars, and the triumph of being.

We see the insanity of our time in the demons of profit. Commerce. Marketing. Branding. The savage gluttony of data centers imposed on rural communities with the brutal of authoritarianism of a barnyard gavage. College professors living in cars. Populations bombed with random indifference. Rampant inflation expressing the rot and corruption conspicuous in the feeding frenzies of the obscenely rich.

It’s a marvelous sight: the Olympic mountains at 2:00 in the afternoon on a warm day in mid-June. I love mountains. When I was kid in my grandfather’s study I used to stare at the Rockies with admiration and wonder. I grew up in Minnesota, where everything is flat, or a quiet undulation of hills. The mountains were full of drama. High dizzying rocks of granite and sparkly schist. My uncle had a cabin up there whose rain barrel held a dark cold water that froze my hand with its shocking cold when I plunged it in. It felt preternatural, like a charm, like the domain of a woodland spirit. I remember that afternoon in Boulder in the summer of 1995 when Allen Ginsberg, who’d been ill, felt well enough to give a talk and a tent went up on the Naropa canvas impromptu. R and I and her friend sat toward the back where David Bromige got divebombed repeatedly by a dragonfly. “They ARE dragons,” he exclaimed. It was sunny when Allen began delivering a fluid and fascinating talk which segued toward Blake’s notion of sweet science. Minutes later a sudden storm of thunder and lightning blew in and bashed against the nearby Rockies. I worried that a bolt of lightning was going to hit an electric cable powering the microphone Allen was using and turn him into a ball of St. Elmo’s fire. Didn’t happen, of course. When we returned to Seattle and picked up the mail I flipped through the latest New Yorker and found a cartoon of Allen Ginsberg holding a fountain pen skyward where it connected with a bolt of lightning.

Inspiration never comes easy. It can’t be forced. You can’t use a crowbar to pry it loose from the grip of the empirical, the drab dreary expectations of the 21^st century dystopia we’re all trapped in. The exhaustions of work and worry. That sense of enchantment poets rely on to do their work has been under siege for quite some time by a fetishized and heavily commodified omnipresence of electronic gadgetry dulling and smothering the inner life of the human spirit. It takes special strategies, all of it uniquely suited to the whims and vagaries of each individual. I generally find it in the work of other poets, or listening to a foreign language. We do what is forbidden: we expend our energy on things that do not lend themselves to branding and commodification. To that which lies well outside the purview of free market Wall Street psychosis. There’s release in that. The giddy intoxication of an impish idleness. The mutiny of doing what is unnecessary. Of what is disastrously unpragmatic. Of whatever needs the raw spontaneity of an unbridled articulation. And is eccentric as the contrary squeak of bedspring revolt. 

Because A Fire Was In My Head

Combustion is only a part of the story here. There was still to be read the old motto of the silver mine: darkness is the nest in which the egg of oblivion holds the pulse of a poem. Poets are miners. Their picks are words. They sweat like anybody else. And could use a shower. And a more stable income. The rustling of an unknown language issues from a shower curtain constellated with pink flamingos. By implications, by folds, we move towards a field of expansibility. If we manage to show intellectual flexibility, can the void surrounding us draw our conversation toward it? The circumstances splashing our shore require our leniency. We need a milieu for these symptoms of a disease we have yet to fully understand. And that milieu is language. The smell of its lumber is delicious. The banshee scream of the saw rips the air into words. Spirit levels. Planks of grammar. Beveled edges. Swirls of grain. We can hammer it with our voices and assemble a new perception of our predicament. The disease isn’t that complicated. Its contagion thrives on subordination. All it needs is a little insubordination. The disease will cure itself.

Everything constitutes a thesis. Cognition is a charming device, and is somewhat like an expedition into the unknown. You can evade a religion, but you can’t evade life. One day you may be fooled by a single hair sprouting out from an eyebrow and think it’s a sign of something eccentric, which, of course, is precisely the case. The Gravitron works by centrifugal force, flattening your body against the wall when the floor drops out. Eccentricity is slightly different. It requires a place like San Francisco, and a point in time like 1966. What happens when you bring together a group of kindred spirits, people who embrace life with joy and openness, the result is a centrifugal thrust of intellectual acuity and long conversations that spiral out into the California night. Crown molding high baseboards and cheap rent. Hold infinity on the palm of your hand. Dilations that elude the grip of the industrial war machine. Reflective ponds pondering the mystery of Being.

Annealing a language to make it less brittle and easier to shape is a good place to begin. You can change the narrative any time you want. You’re not going to get a lot of cooperation at first. You’re not going to be popular. There will be no stacks of your books at the airport gift shop sandwiched like a towering éclat of polished reliable prose between stacks of Kristin Hannah and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Nobody likes a sentence that isn’t entirely sure of where it’s going. Nobody likes a bumbling merry-andrew feeling around in the dark for a light switch, grabbing at your unmentionables and tripping over quatrains. Reading is a lost art. Which makes it especially dangerous. That’s why the powers that be like to hide it with best-sellers. You can feel the tension in the editing rooms. There are things you can’t say now. Things you can’t think. Not without consequences. Not without rebuke. Not without losing a tenured position, or losing an argument to ChatGPT.

Nothing at the gas station is ever satisfying. But the odors are intense, and the memories can overwhelm a so-so mood while the gasoline throbs through the hose. It always feels so cool going in. And the numbers add up with dizzying worries. Whatever is meant by fuzzy can gather into calico and clothe a demure desire to tango with a wild perspicacity. Therefore, let me bless this formaldehyde with a macabre burlesque and burn a hole in the fabric of our consciousness. Let a little light come in. Engage our bones with some ocean brine. I used to be against almost everything. Now I am against everything. In fact, I’m leaning on it. I use it for support. And contrast. I believe in contradiction. And the majesty of minimalism. I’m always on the alert for an escape route. And a map of the unknown. Which is a discrepancy so flagrantly lost in its latitudes, even the cormorants are confused.

Inconsistency is my very essence, claimed Boethius. The consistency of any inconsistency is a bellwether to the skies of March. Predictability is a cheap date but a cactus in bed. An unfettered language doesn’t predict; it coagulates. Behind each consonant, there is something like eyes staring back at us. Something wounded. Something coming alive in our imagination. It coheres according to a system different from the chilling ultramarine of a cold logic. Trees somewhere, glimpsed through a crack in the monotony of daily life, draw us into their world with their alluring outlines and eccentric incongruities. Anything we can derive from this quirk in consciousness is a blessing, a quick release from the domain of the sanctioned. The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun, as Yeats frames it. That’s what poets are for. They’ve got the keys to the door. 

The Golden Tempo Of The Dream Machine

 

My boots are moguls of leather I need someone to roll the window down I need fresh Wyoming air if your breath can sustain a string of words you can say almost anything and you’ll feel soothed you’ll waddle like a duck and quack hilarious epiphanies to the surrounding hills

I’m feeling talented today I’m just not sure what specific talent I have there’s a universe behind my eyes is it the same as the one in front of my eyes I can’t be sure but it’s worth looking into let’s start with the wobbly properties involved in the geometric deformation of objects polyhedral sonnets in continuous transformation mathematical entities blasts of sunlight crashing through the blinds to glimmer and dance among the many banjos hanging on the wall everybody knows the butter is melting a feeling that big needs a show Deak Harp live at the Blue Canoe in Tupelo if you’ve got to milk a riddle any old barn will do what old soul among these hungry ghosts could refuse to descend into the untranslatable musings of Rilke

It takes about five hundred catfish to push the river my left eye shrinks and distorts people I have a macular hole an immaculate ejaculate and the dishes are breaking due to a nascent personality unfamiliar with Dawn dish soap

Everything’s on thin ice these days this will rip it into summer everywhere I go I see helicopters tents on all the sidewalks I’ve got androids hemorrhoids earthquakes wars extremism autism fauvism quantum tunneling lunar swirls ball lightning the cry of Memnon missing NASA officials on my mind and a big cardboard box stuffed with letters from the 60s when people were still people and said things full of spirit and enthusiasm

I love illusions your breasts are sizzling with nipples galore and a map of China

Just below the surface of these words there’s a hawk urging you to jump into your life naked just below the dirt all the images talk among themselves the natural sphere of Ungeschirmtheit is the invisible and interior of consciousness what are poets for they’re the bees of the invisible pollinating our minds the world surrounding us is diverse and teeming with life certain phenomena can evolve in such a way the symmetries shimmer into variances of the initial state creating the grammar of phenomena in which physics is written and everything relational is what it is by relation with one another there are no absolute structures in the cosmos God is what consciousness is before it knows anything at all a pure ground that has not yet split into subject and object and that’s when paraphernalia helps Porsche apple wallet car keys the golden tempo of the dream machine Spirit Airlines Minnesota Lynx Dallas Wings Howlin’ Wolf’s Hohner C harp Spinoza’s microscopes temporary shifts in airflow

Our current dystopia is tumbling into YouTube nostalgia we’re all pioneers at heart from noon to Yuma it must mean something I wear spurs wide-brimmed hats quantum waves of barroom bandana discord attracts my fingers there’s a swimming pool in my eye here comes Calamity Jane smoking a cheroot I nod hello she completely ignores me I keep my thoughts to myself what am I doing here how did I get on this train I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something all I know for sure is that I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb and the test of a good sarsaparilla is a quick earthy kick backed by an asymmetric bravado

If you see something luminous it’s probably a poem ten feet tall with 14 legs and a pair of jersey wings I like my coffee black you can think anything during sex and it will lead to a further engagement with the natural world convulsing within its own wreckage anyone can run a chainsaw but who can fly a washing machine over the Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia whatever opens your door is perfectly fine be it a knob be it a button last night we saw Picasso in a boa there was something instinctive about it don’t ask me for the meaning of life the answer is shining on the blade of an agave what kind of language urges intimacy I don’t know but there’s a tuna in my pants I can feel its revelatory perturbances I like your lack of severity some situations are just like that they look supernatural when the lightning strikes but really my boots are moguls of leather just waiting for some new soles new laces flappy new tongues seven league strides and a can of Danner Boot Wax