Paper Peacock Eye

 When sensations become words, words become sensations. For example, a wedding engagement. Or a bite of grapefruit. The augmentation of warmth in a room after dialing the thermostat up a few degrees. Arthritis. Bronchitis. Bursitis. Phlebitis. Age begs to voyage across the hallway tied to a sideboard. The sensation is considerable. It makes the road reflect your dollop of toss with a vague assertion of authority. The rue d’Orsel teems with sexual halibut. It makes you want to stir a canoe with your tongue. My emotions drift toward fulfillment with the excited chirping of newly hatched birds. Beat a man below the man we think we’ve become, and anguish soon follows. There are many species of anguish, including Hollywood and Vine. It’s cruel to give a man wealth after he’s turned ninety-one. Can anyone read this sentence while standing on their skin? Listen hard into a joy beneath its eating. I will climb on board and help throw cake at the variables. We hose our house with a horse of hose. The movement of a hoe, by any other noise, can move improbably fast. Someone sews a fiction near my grotto and I open into a flower. Anyone tin can see the elephant is a stab at paradox. Before abstraction, I had the rain in my hand, falling up like a pronoun. I put this paradigm here to mull over a concept of heaven. Everything growls in my life, even the more spiritual aspects. Hinduism appears as a demonstration of fireworks. A few of us turn violent, and translate ourselves as swirls. I can’t say I recommend it. It strains attitude, and causes seclusion. Knock before I cry. I feel a force that is mentally expansive steam my dreaming into a knife. The minerals I unfold glide into clapping. The infinite mode I make out of each fiber is my testament to compote. Hills open it.  Since what happens is stunning, and clacks like a noodle. This dream is a spectacular carnality such as it is in Cyprus on a Wednesday in July. Each incentive arrives with a song and a bruise. Below our tension my sweat is heavy as freight. The thermostat combines a bicycle with a honeysuckle and produces piles of vital signs, all of them intriguing as our needs. Gravity is not enough to describe the female breast. Secrets have veins, like a radio. If you wiggle the aggressions, you will tune in some irony. The mushrooms excuse our dimension. Consonants were squashed, and there was some harm done at a nearby airport. Sparks exhumed from a lamp black abandonment. I extend a detail to this in my preface. This is how the greenhouse was improbably enhanced, and the orchids fluttered with semantic instability. It’s my party and I can farm my aurora if want to. Spout salt. The iron evocation beyond is everything garish by tension and wealth. I was never everything a dollar could do on a Saturday in downtown Reno. I had butterflies in my voice. Life had the flavor of an ancestral bean. I think I held a scruple. There was a chocolate I could squat by yelling. Life isn’t always brocade. Sometimes it employs pickles, and starts an army of starving magicians. A sense unfolds itself to chewing another chiffon dime. Another calculus. Optical silk. Paper peacock eye. The clouds outside the steel, where a perspective bursts open. I hunger for cracks. It bubbles a sticky opium into what I needed just now. Another staircase for the proverbs rising out of my aviary. Anyone at a bronze job. We stand near the embroidery, redeeming denim. Sometimes an injury softly fluttered in gauze quivers beside it. Let me clean some gasoline and crackle the bounce of your Subaru with blue bayou. The more seminal emotions crowd toward the palpable and spoon their genitals for time. It is a suppleness at its most dazzling. I can hallucinate almost anyone at the drop of a paradigm. The paragraph air will suffice until the greenhouse grins like a mood juggled with spit. If you look hard into the future, you can see it balancing on a preterite, coughing up metaphors. 

Cuticles Curlicues And A Life Of Fog

Language isn’t always about curlicues. A metaphysics works it. A moody ripple moves the there of it to the here of it. I see it as a grammar dripping the lines I use for daily existence. The dusty feeling I have for walking turns the pages of my life as I move from paragraph to paragraph. The words do everything. They tilted my forehead to look like Balzac. A hectic metaphor echoed across the ping pong table, causing actual presupposition.  I banged our paddle talk into the beyond, where it belongs, along with my Euclidean fish. Your orange ghost sells a wedding ring there much akin to swimming in our grain. Wilderness has a lot to say about prospect. In language, we roll toward wisdom, and ripen in wire. A solace plays inside it, a hugged ablution in among the lost attention spans. There are roots to it beyond the will to deformation. My cuticles spread into fingers sometime after all the trouble I had with most of everything. I quit construction to live a life of fog. In college, my thunder was almost conspicuous. But one night I paddled the Orinoco with Picasso. We felt the weight of it on our consciousness, and our eyes glowed with Fauvism. The local semen brought everyone news of our discovery. I cracked ocher with absence, and fed my legs to the wiles of the sidewalk. We pull on our ambitions, expecting them to stew into fierce simulations of fencing. Without them, we are walnut. Their balloons are neither going across the sentence as words or claiming semantic roles in a farrago of squirts, they’re serving the horizon of our love, and each has a palette with your face in it. I seldom howl at the sublime in my fire. Instead, I adjust my belt of roots and ape virtuosity. I feel friendly toward any acceptance of what I do with the ocean inside my head. Therefore, I shall release a mobius vapor to indicate the presence of a power beneath the snow. The ghost we pinned to the palate of our mouths is as sandstone as anyone they hire to play Hamlet. Something beyond wood fulminates this into another hymn. Each resource evades your ability to walk around in plus signs. You’re either a pulse, or a driver’s license test. This escalator is taking us somewhere without maps. I was against it tomorrow. I put it in a stream of consciousness, grabbed a marking pen, and wrote Ulysses. We sanded our grammar toward it, until it was soft, and had struts and asymmetries. My window has a heart. I include snaps on my jacket as a cause of sculpture. Coordinates carry my plans for a new day of pamphlets and cabbage. I fell off the planet swarming with harmonies and minutes later dilated with revelation. There is a dry monstrosity about the implications of work. This wanders around looking to redeem the faith in evasion. Until we let go and find ourselves in a Pascalian circumference, the grip that keeps squeezing our narratives until they burst beyond the hooks and knots of attachment will not undo its doing until it is done pursuing figures of speech and other forms of igloo. When I quit a sidewalk, I glow with the panic of it, and thunder to speculate what might become of the cracks when nobody stops to appreciate the quiddity of the unfamiliar. But I do. I take it in. All of it. The whole kit and caboodle. Then I cure it with silk and wear it like steam. And this exalts my spirit, and convulses like a bistro in Lisbon.  

Adventures In Is-Ness

If there are other worlds parallel to ours, worlds organized differently than ours, and following a different logic, poetry is the door to those worlds. Things might look the same, but that's not what's different. What's different is the tenor, the timbre, the qualia. The table I'm sitting at will be different, more detailed, more unique, more specific. The desk dates from early years of the past century. It belonged to my grandmother. She kept a diary at it, recording the harvests, the prices for wheat and milk and cream, deer hunts, bowling competitions, amounts of snow and rain, illnesses, injuries, births, deaths, repairs to the barn and people - such as myself - coming to visit. The desk is oak. I'll see rhythms in the grain, waves and undulations, the energy flowing through it. It has a flap that comes down to provide a surface for writing and an upper surface where I keep a bottle of water, a clock, a pheasant feather quill from a Renaissance Faire north of San Francisco, a paperweight, a pair of Bose noise-canceling earphones, and a lamp. What seems other about this world is the way it has been defamiliarized. It looks the same but different. The Russians have a word for this: ostranenie. Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky introduced the term in his 1917 foundational essay "Art as Technique." It describes the poetic technique of framing common, everyday things in a manner that makes them appear strange and unfamiliar, as if being experienced for the first time. It is a different experience than endlessly scrolling an electronic screen looking for a dopamine hit and novel sensation. It is far more immersive and crosses the boundary between self and non-self, categorized and non-categorized. There are no categories. No classifications. There are only pluralities. It is more like reading Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. Suddenly, the language people use exchanging rumors and niceties at a dinner table and framing their narratives in tidy packets of information turns into a semantic wilderness, a vast, unpredictable ocean of mists and monsters, nautical perversions and Jurassic chandeliers. Life pulses through it turning the veins purple, the eyes obsidian, and the combinations combustible and endless. When I sat down I was human, and when I stood up flocks of starlings flew out of my eyes. 

Everything Is Alright

This need for inference is beginning to intone its inflation around vermilion, which pulses like beeswax in a voluptuous clairvoyance. My feet remain swollen during their punctuation. Buttons everywhere are an enthralling employment. I hold this sensation to be a critical dynamic, pertinent as wire through an umbrella. It floats some of the oddest reveries it has been my pleasure to indulge. The mind fulminates with the ambiguity of this moment, this juncture of form, and sets a canvas with spouts in eight inches of snow. As you can see, someone has ruffled my problem. Look at all these gardens in books. Who waters these words? Whose eyes bring them into being? Whose bruises argue with the dreams they create? Whose arms hold nothing as if it were bald, and attracted butterflies? I can’t say. I’m just here for the mints.

The congeniality of tea is a fulcrum among the lovers of firth and flimflam. This fabric of woof and warp inhabits nothingness like a poem ratchets a bolt on a bridge of sighs. I will answer to everything during a splash of cologne. Seclusion is a thing in the mud coughing up rubies of linguistic spinet. I attempt visiting a monstrosity as someone on the shore waves frantically. I saw a puddle in the street once perturb itself through a sorcery of mood and wind applied with the precise amount of languor. Meanings are garish and lyrical. They should be used sparingly, like mushrooms and honey. Sparrows notice anything in the sand positioned by toys and dowagers. Everyone crawls toward a novel perspective as if their lives depended on it. It’s a statement of power. Nothing is ever a problem, until it gets up and dances in a spirited ecstasy, chuckles a rascally syntax. 

I thermostats it all into a tidepool. All my secrets are pullulated by ganglion. I push them about in a crappy wheelbarrow. A mind with arms lifts a thought by the measure of its tongue and viscera. Think of it as a texture. Extrude a winch. Someone crinkles our constancy into a tension we later resolve with a chocolate reality. Savor this kiss after it ceases clattering across the floor and pondering our feet. I feel like an astronomer dipped in gossip. Please amuse this.

Bitumen includes all of my misgivings despite its indispensable taste. I enjoy wearing denim after a parody of wind. The pop of it. The astringency of it. I have seen a palace alter its gantry in the middle of a sentence, and carry it at death into a nearby cave. I turn and clench the surrounding space like a coincidence, which squirms inside my glee as it gets expansive. And everything is alright.

Blue Suede Shoes

Believe it anyway. Bend everybody toward the horizon. My despair just happens to eschew myopia. A highway is never about distance. It emerges from a need for speed and has a way to make that happen. The revelatory is nowhere near a study. The smash of those ideas was unrivalled behind the studio until we poured lighter fluid on the charcoal briquettes and all hell broke loose. We were all affectionately rippled by its music there. I painted the gulp the army took at the Mexican border. If sophisticated alive as we had been, we found ourselves going at it there. The bas-relief of it. The truth of it. The physicality of it. Everything moving forward. Everything exaggerated. All the deformations tooled by desperate philosophers. 

We throw hints at the wall hoping for something like an accordion to drive around in music. The snow is at it again, flowering into snowmen as it falls. I like to rub what we feel together. This generates work for some of us. We don’t mind. Most autonomy already dwells in it. The fish tube. The unpredictable. The granite kitchen counter. Build there among its coils. I will gush holes, and excel at coasting. The Pythagorean fiber slashed beneath us offered drugs of a sort no one was familiar with. All we remember is that it was made of math and fountained numbers. My sleeves still simmer from the flight. The twitching guzzles at blood.

If there is indeed a beyond, don’t drive with cruel intent. Drive with refinement and sophistication. There’s a vividness in today’s poetry that has yet to be further explored for its moonshine. There’s a start there. We should get going before anyone can figure out what the sidewalks were trying to tell us. What the blots were about. What the cracks meant. Anybody clashing beside our ablutions is welcome to convulse in its grace and beauty. The engines lure everyone into a false conclusion, which keeps the story going. Emotions run deep. But I can’t tell you how I feel. There are no words for it. I feel compelled to wear a mask. Anything we glitter is fine by me. The orchid’s architecture has a sense of hemorrhagic vertigo. They grow so powerfully I think it comes from their grace and delicacy. I like to watch people chew their points into glaciers. The rest of the journey is optional. But you might want to hang around anyway. The glow we pound aloud at Christmas has a gluttonous plan to get us through the season with our gloves off and our vulnerability showing. Which proves nothing. Gravity is just all feathers. 

A deliverance of unprecedented bubbles has arrived in time for the festivities. The world swirls around in a gyrational West Virginia dance. I set an escalator inside its basis. I get ugly straining to lift a world beside a theorem. What the singing did was topaz. We meditated above its resilience. Everything bristles on the escalator. What a dusty world we’ve all become. The escape toward its percussion gave us hope for an evening of Proust and apple cider. A souvenir gut they clubbed into inanition. We should each shoot this sand as we would a pillow or a sachet. Confusion twists it among gestures. We walk without direction. Our story, meanwhile, spirits gleefully along waving at anyone and anything. 92.3FM, Las Vegas. There must be some kind of way out of here said the joker to the thief. You get the picture. ‘67 Mustang. Top down. Desert air blowing through your hair.

My blue suede shoes have since become language. I’ve learned how to pull my weight along a path of awakening during a concentration induced from chaos. This signals the garments in which I languish. The gravity engines idle in a steady prolongation of weightless optimism. The solace of a comb does it with nothing. I am my own hair, and I wear it with a cognizance of baldness creeping in. Someone somewhere goes to cry privately somewhere else during the language that curls around our motorcycle repair shop in downtown Metaphor. Somebody burst this drawer open and letters and underwear went flying through the air. Can anyone out there fold my exhilaration into a Bob Dylan song? If we leave right now, we can reach the end of this sentence before sun comes up and the 3:10 from Yuma goes by and the period makes it final. This has been a poem. It had me wondering. I wasn’t sure. It made me feel weird. I’ve never owned any blue suede shoes. But I do now.  

 

Three Prose Poems

                                          Hibiscus

And so. What now, my little angels? Where to? And what for? It's always the same old story. Birth, death, reincarnation as a Goodyear tire. Don’t start me rolling. Once I get going, it’s difficult to stop. Even when things start looking cataclysmic, catastrophic, and fungal. Slowly, chestnut by chestnut, I will make another ocean. Meanwhile, I’m going to go get the laundry. I swear, if you listen closely, you can hear an egg-timer in the Stone's "Can't You Hear Me Knocking." It’s what I use to remind me I’ve got some laundry to attend to. Things to mend. Fellowships to restore. Trunks to pack. Memories to unpack. Grace means more than clean underwear. It means never having to say thank you for choosing me I won’t let you down. I never cared much for that role. I was more of a see you later alligator guy. Or at least I pretended to be. The reality was different. As it always is. That’s the dark side of reality: it’s real. I miss every person to whom I’ve said goodbye. And never said hello again. It’s why I’m drawn to art. There's nothing like going up to an attic in the summer and finding objects enchanted with the dust of obfuscation. You clear the webs and find the time to put your nose into a big bowl of meringue. And wonder what happened to books and affordability. Redemption and hiding. Privacy and hobbies. The radio on late at night. The Goon Show. And a hibiscus.

                     We All Saw It Coming

 

We all saw it coming. But we could never agree on where it came from. My life began with Rimbaud. And ended with profligacy, industrial seasonings, and imbecility. It felt like being in a Sam Shepherd play. And then everything happened. Chaos. Camels. And lipstick. The pyramids were mighty and gave us a sense of assurance. Death lies beneath everything. There are three things in life you can always count on: problems, accidents, and ping pong. Everything else makes me quiver. I can hardly stand, much less sing. Is this an age in which to think about publication? Why not? The show must go on. I can’t help admire certain paradoxes, my favorite being the authenticity of fiction and the lies that go hand in hand with truth. And thank god for cognitive dissonance. Or just plain dissonance. And the many problems that brought me here, looking for you to help me solve them. Some things are so irrational they deserve a suite at the top of the Ritz. You can paint anything you want if you have your own calamity and a place to do it. This is a Bob Dylan song. He never wrote it. I did. I like Bob Dylan. And there was time and consideration. Hippopotamus. Old oak doors. The soft orange clouds of a Wyoming morning. The end feels surprisingly similar to the beginning. And that makes me circular. Fashionably nonlinear. And sexy as a remedy for work.

                             Knock Knock

 

Knock knock. Who’s there? Anarchy. Anarchy who? None of your business. Well, come back later none of my business, when you’re feeling a little more garrulous and less anarchic. You old libertarian you. Here’s what I think: back in paleolithic times I’ll bet women did go hunting with the men. Women are better at spotting details than men. As for raising children, I’m hesitant to speculate. I’ve only raised one human being. And that was me. And I failed. Repeatedly. The possibilities were daunting. I got lost in alternatives. Diversions. I matured more like a gingko biloba than an arugula. I made so many bad decisions it’s a miracle I’m still here. I had a penchant for getting lost in details. It’s a feminine trait, but I’m proud to be a fop. It takes a real man to be a sissy. Hotspur can take his toxic masculinity elsewhere. I’m riding my favorite rocket to the far edge of the known universe and having a shot of bourbon, a corned beef sandwich, and a good long look at nothing. Anyone knocks on the door, tell them I’m indisposed. I’m busy reminiscing. And I’ve got a lot to reminisce. Don’t Go Now. Paint It Black. A Day in the Life. I don’t want to see you go. But you’d better go now. I’ll save you a seat when the shit hits the fan. And I put the flap of my old oak desk up a final time.

 

Anything Henna

 I grieve against it. Those who hold that life in a bubble is unfulfilling are probably spies from another hairstyle. My components revolt against another eye. Another elevation unfolding a drum circle. Mountains scud through everything. They all deserve iron. Therefore, pleasure becomes a sizzling inclusion of everything.

Most hives include the twinkle of it. I’m sticky from it. Molasses on the stove. Most occurrences occur as a result of strongly held feelings. Our forever jingling with vital exceptions. A kiss during spurts. A gasoline spout about to release Seattle. I feel more strongly about henna. Anything henna is fine by me.

Some of our friends are dead. Power is nobody’s friend. That’s not what it’s for. Sometimes a painter paints the wrong carrot. Carrots don’t look like Blaise Pascal. Carrots look like carrots. I’m diving in circles today. As you can see. There are ripples fastened to this image of summer. I tried to tell you this morning. I climbed into another version of myself. It had Beach Boy vibes. I’m doing this during good vibrations humming in all the wires. Panic in panoply. Planet Earth in deep shit.

Don’t worry, baby. Consumerism isn’t half bad when you’re on the sweet side of eighteen. You’ll spend the rest of your life hunting for that youth. Unless you wise up. Space is enriched by space. Time is enriched by time. Therefore, be merry and climb into your chrysalis. I’m calling on all the gods in history to come down and help us figure this whole thing out. My eyebrows sound like aquariums. My bones go bone to bone inciting riots and crippled pentameters. Writing makes its incisions apparent in indecisions. Paradigms box the war. War wins. The sky thunders. My premonitions break their harness and race toward the horizon. I feel like I have a wormhole in my life collapsing spacetime parameters. I remember when a dime could haul your ass into a peepshow and a quarter got you a nod from Tom Waits. The salty slop between Seattle’s piers was constellated with jellyfish. Winter draped the city with mist. I am a lineman for the county filled the waves. Immediacy felt urgent as getting my pants on during a fire. Before our destiny became a manufactured consent. And then no consent. Just a rant on TikTok.