Process And Tung Tree

I see any proposition advanced in the glaze of a heated moment as a pinch of prodigal air. Because if you encounter an orchard in the middle of a fog, you need a way to talk to it. A lute, or a mantra. We must build an algebra of fingers based on the temperature of the sun. And if there’s a bandage on someone’s knee, we can determine the general attitude of the hotel staff. It is a matter of vital importance to peel it, examine it, and light it up. Which reminds me: the Chilean fire tree by the Methodist church on West Garfield is beginning to bloom. Intensity in a tree is a wonderful thing to behold. Strength is a noble quality, though it is sometimes gnarled and tough with contradictions. Sometimes, indeed—in response to some word that burst forth from God—there would come, in a harsh tone, an insolent retort that shocked everyone. This is why animals avoid the language arts. Those who indulge in its arsenal of elixirs and incantations are called poets, and the lives they lead are wildly impractical, and nastier than antifreeze.

The meaning of this is still in process. I don’t know why this is happening. I’ll have to wait for the meaning of this to help explain why anything is being written. Until then, let’s keep kneading the dough and heating the oven with trepidation. It was my original intent to undermine capitalism and replace it with buffalo. Get naked, and return to our Edenic state. Explore new perceptions, the spiral part of the inner ear, and the history of dice. Wait a minute. I think I heard a door open. I think it’s here now. The meaning. The meaning I’m writing this. It had something to do with transport, both in a literal and a transcendent sense, and why I’m here posing such questions. If I can find the answer to that then I’ll know what this is about. But I’ve already forgotten what it was that brought me here. I know. Imagine The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet. That’s what brought me here, 78 years ago. And I’ve been trying to get back ever since.

I hate to say it, but I think I’m headed in the wrong direction. I see lights ahead, and delicacies and buccaneers. I see Eros in the gold camps and Kavijihvagravasini at all the open mikes. Kavigihvagravasini. Pronounced kah-vee-jih-vuh-gruh-vaa-see-nee. A Hindi word meaning “one who dwells on the tongue of poets.” And that would be Goddess Saraswati. Once again, I have to ask myself, how did I end up here? Mensuration and poetry are falling in love. That would be one reason. Another has to do with capacitance, the ability to store electrical energy, and feed it to an appendage of hungry words. There is sometimes a protuberance from a bone for the attachment of character, which is a distinctive combination of traits, or velvetleaf blueberries. And this gestalt needs constant feeding, or it turns highly unstable and desires food it cannot eat, which makes the appetite stronger and the resistance weaker. And ends up in a bar in downtown Milwaukee gobbling up cashews and listening to the ghost of T.S. Eliot read The Wasteland.

Milwaukee is derived from Algonquin and means gathering place by the waters. The present is composed of the past and is therefore Lethe, doing its utmost to forget while simultaneously lathering it with jojoba and coconut. The effort to forget is the best way to insure that the past has a foundation. Forgetting requires oblivion, not photo albums. In this paper, I urge a scent to grab itself and rise to the ceiling like incense. Because you can talk to odor. It has ears, and smells like dragon’s blood. Come forward, and sing. We celebrate your elegance. We who haunt every word. We who seek solace in stopgaps. In stout nomenclatures and hydrogen jukebox snow. Little Richard. Lucille. The gentle equivocation of a gracious credibility. Independence elevates us, even when the elegies turn dark, and surrounds our raft with eddies of perfect cleavage.

We stitch a puddle, then take a whirlwind tour of the algebra of the situation. You know: the shape of the sandwich, the bristles of the scrub brush, the insects crawling up your back. I’ve been here all day trying to mingle with the locals without drawing too much attention to myself. It’s hard to do if you’re the one putting words together, and making them spin around in people’s minds. The wind sculpted sandstone of places like Utah fascinates me. It represents a level of creative energy that inhabits the zone of the uncontrollable. It’s what I’m after. What I want in my bag of tricks. A gasoline I dry with a phantom towel as I try to manage my escape from control. Let’s hang around and see if any joy comes to visit us. I can feel it in the wind: cold palms and icy fingers. We’re nearing the end now. We’re getting closer. We’ll be getting an answer soon. Will it be the triumph of evil? Will it be the winter of grace? Will the sky crack open revealing all of eternity? I think it’ll be whatever the universe coughs up. They say the beginning of the end is the end of the beginning beginning again. And again and again. I’m not here to argue. Or prophesy. I just had to get it out. Everything. Except my tattoo of mystic wind.

 

The Red Eye To Beatitude

The day is colloidal. Everything floats in suspension. We wander through our intentions while all around us life teems, capers, unfolds and swirls. Diversions make it glitter. My ghost is alive. I can feel it tear the heart out of morning and boil it in veneration. I flourish in its presence. I will broaden my perspectives in the spring. I need every little detail to include a fountain like the one in Saint Sulpice, where Baudelaire was born. My work balloons into a polysemic migration. My perspective gets this big sometimes when it widens and the morning swims through the rain. Why do people like candles? I like wheels. Chacun à son gout. Does anyone have any idea what it means to be photogenic? I find that shamans are, as a rule, more photogenic than investment bankers. And there, on the bookshelf, an amber sparrow cries its secrets. This proves nothing. But it does suggest discharge. A surge of crustaceans, and the giant architecture of Bach.

Anguish puts harm in the mouth. Words are gluttons for utterance. You can never do enough to appease their lust for expression. I butter my conceits with the syntax of heaven. Even that’s not enough. This is a hard time for language. People don’t trust it. It has become a magnet for lies. Poets everywhere in the world are working hard to resuscitate its dreams. You can hear the thunder of something cataclysmic tremble in the air like traffic lights. Horses at a monstrous gallop stampede the distant sky. I feel a vocabulary contort like eels around my tongue. I knew something was off when the 7-11s began to disappear. Right now, I just want to put a cap on this thought and go to bed. My brain is entangled in emails. When it comes to existence, I feel like a tenant. Even worse: a tourist. But this wasn’t the plan. I boarded the wrong plane. The red eye to beatitude. We’re flying over Athens now. I can see the Parthenon. And the lightning of Zeus.

What is the true measure of a nail? Hint: it’s not a hammer. Once you learn to describe a caboose, the front of a train begins to affect a kind of pluck. Anyone who has groped around in the dark with an urgent need to exist, knows the meaning of interaction. It’s not so much I’m against the current administration as I am trying to stay free of its sewage. I think we can all agree that a scurry across the ocean floor is better than a swim in the Sargasso Sea. The differences, as always, are more like the sensitivity of skin than the idiosyncrasies of truffles. Both have beauty, both evince comedy. It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas. Said Paul Cezanne. I couldn’t agree more. No one approved the powder, but somewhere beneath the song, there was to contact to be had with the action committee. At the count of three, I want everyone to verge on feathery brushstrokes. I have a soft, misty feeling that things are about to get wild. And when that happens, I want a sentence near me, so that I can begin another quadrille, and jingle my bells in joy.

I delight in catachresis. I hope you don’t hold it against me. It might leave an indelible trinket. I tremble just to think of it: an entire orchestra of motorcycles. My fingernails, turns out, aren’t as monotonous as I once believed. I have an entire philosophy based on Ireland. Its weather, its people, its shenanigans. I like to find a muscle and rub it with subtlety. It helps me to feel alive, and focus on things kinetic and skittish during croquet. You can’t weigh a thought expecting a troy ounce to whirl into hardware. We all carry a void within ourselves that serves as a reminder that the lightest, most immaterial things in the world, things that are barely things at all, are among some of the heaviest. Mass is overrated. Or is it underrated? I can never tell. Back in the day, we used to say heavy with regard to profound thoughts and perceptions. Heavy, man. Like that. I thought it was a bit of a cliché at the time. But now I think it’s apt. Because I can barely lift it anymore. And when I drop it, it smashes into a million words, and gives me catachresis.

Thoughts once cost a penny. Now they’re worth nothing. Nobody wants them. They clutter the attic. They get tripped over. You can’t even find them at Costco, much less MIT. But here’s a thought: anchoring an idea in sepia is as magically incidental to a rattle as it is to a suffix in Sussex. One is as close-fitting as psychoanalysis, and the other is loose as a goose on a surface of ice. But there’s the deal. The psychology of weight should be celebrated in bed. Don’t you think? The weightiest thought in the world unravels into nothing. And this has as much to do with the right as the left, up with down, mano a mano, mushin or isshin, over under sideways down. And feels good just to let it drift though the mind. Sometimes like a banner. Sometimes like a cloud. And when it rains the air has the fragrance of negative irons, and the dirt turns dark and fertile. 

Howl Of The Hellgrammite

The anarchic cloth bag leaning against the table is because many of my Fauve exercises need a glimpse of Cézanne. Cables, pulleys, adjustable seats. Big mountains. Cylinders, spheres, cones. Ambiguous perspectives. A phantom architecture— what we call the hypothetical—wanders straight ahead and screams into the void. You can walk among a group of people with the sensitivity of a burn victim and still manage to piss someone off. Nerves are on edge, as they say. Everyone looks like they’re circling an emotion, unsure of its wildness and tractability. This is to be expected. The heart is where we take root. The mind is where we flower.

An uprising in algebra can upset a hypothesis, but a marvel in words, a description of hell by a spirit of iron boldness, can empower the making of any incision in the air, out of which plops the future of our tribe. Diagnosis is a ghost of predication. An X-ray's phantom bones. My whisper is nonsense. But navigable as any Géricault, or Corot. These feathers will fuse to a swan if the right force is applied to the grammar of sympathy.    

Snow falls upon a greedy life and says fix this, someone. And so somebody does and it looks like a palace of ice. The reflection of it grows inside the embryo after your strain to live it. We all live behind a face. You either learn to trust it, or at least give it a good haircut. There’s an easel in the corner with a canvas on it. The image of a woman sprawled in folds of space, a face anonymous as silk. There are occasions when the absence of warmth is itself a form of heat. Whatever hangs down, cast it forth; let a wild nature set your invocation ablaze. I’m feeling greedy now, and intriguing, and kerosene. Am I conjugable? I have voice, mood, tense, number, and person. Places to go, things to be, gatherings to attend, moods to pursue, ideas to thrash and parry, doors to open, perceptions to unearth. Invention isn’t easy. Poetry, completely shattered, carries its compulsions with grace. The last time I visited a planetarium I fell asleep. And when I awoke, I was no longer on planet Earth. I don’t know where I was. Europa? The Crab Nebula, maybe. Proxima Centauri, improbable, implausible, but wholly laudable. Which is what I meant to say all along, that poetry isn’t just a planetarium, it’s the whole damn universe.

Age riddles the skin. We become wise, but nobody listens. We become pioneers of the ephemeral, the legendary, and the crepuscular. We become hermits in crowds and philosophers in towels. Our eyebrows go crazy and our umbrellas break. The night walks out of itself then walks back into itself, humming Moon River. And it does this every day, strains to get a hold on things, then lets it go. I believe they call this Japan. Though it might also be a miniature universe, pouring itself all over the bed.

Sometimes you can spot a poem on a page and for whatever reason do a deep dive into it and discover an entire panorama of riddles and complexities and endless associations. I think that’s important, especially now, as the empire collapses, and the first thing to go, as always, is virtue. Eyes look haunted and potentially savage. The streets are full of hungry ghosts. At night, the stars are blocked by the edifice of progress. Various narratives shape its evolution. Most are elegies, but some bite into the big cookie and become tokens of moral appraisal. They become fables, harmonicas, and drifters. Adepts of emphasis. Masters of Kabuki. The narratives are critical to the maintenance of illusion. One in particular, an allegory, takes shape at the heart of a captivating text, amidst so many shades of gray it’s difficult to name any of them with any hope of accuracy. Personhood gets ruminative, and weird. It drifts further and further from the familiar, and ends up in a comic book, making an incision in a sheet of paper as a poem oozes forth, howling like a hellgrammite. The eyes are black. The wings are maroon. It rises. It intrigues. It organizes itself into a chrysalis, and emerges months later in the dazzling hues of crisis.      

 

Ellipsis

I wish you could’ve seen this before it became a sentence. The initial idea, to create an elongated device upon which to rotate an object or to join several parts together using words or remedies that appear to come from another dimension, collapsed under the weight of its terrible ambition and splattered the walls with sanguinity. I need to be more like water. Water readily yields its need for space and chimes graciously with a world of spirals. But how do you make anything mechanical that has the fluidity and circumlocution of wine? One could begin with leather, but that requires death, and coagulation. Transformation is seldom this provisional, and yet a massive extraversion dwells among its gratuities. Everything requires a certain interval in which to service its debts and come to terms with oblivion. Purple is indeed my favorite color. My arm can hold everyone within the parameter of this purport. I feel that the pull on it can become something I can accentuate. Maybe later, when we're in Spain, and the geraniums are thriving.

Let us turn the page now to page 19 of your life and see what’s going on. Pirates have seized the stronghold and sway to the Caribbean rhythms of a long stroll through a nimble advantage. Shine. Shine, my friend. I'm giving you everything. Everything I wanted to give you. Impetus, muscle, and jewelry. My impairment, when it comes to dollars, has been a blessing in disguise. If it weren't for asymmetry, if it weren't for imperfection, if it weren’t for intervening spaces and sloppy conduct, if it weren’t for moles and warts and intellectuals, the universe as we know it could not exist. If matter and antimatter had been perfectly matched at the beginning, the cosmos would consist solely of photons and energy with no stars, or galaxies, or life. My subscription to Wizard Daily would expire, and I would never reach the end of À la recherche du temps perdu, much less its beginning. I would never have had a Banzai Burger at the Red Robin on Eastlake. Or thumbed a ride to Redding in 1974. Or be here now. Blasting to Neptune on a one-way ticket to serendipity.

Popular opinion sometimes signifies that which freely emanates from the moving mass. Which is not often good. What you want is a freely diversified expansion of germination. A place to sit and read and watch the world mull upon nothing as it teems with life. It sometimes occurs to people that they’re not who they thought they were. As one door slams shut, another opens. Rocks slide across the floor of Death Valley in high desert winds. And this becomes a poem. And a big casino. Flashing lights. Ecstasies and lows. People think it’s cute when extraterrestrials do Disco. It’s as if a windlass were built within our DNA and we hoisted anchor when things turned moldy and sour. This led to a search for the soul and a leaning toward exotic literature. Muscles work in harmony with one another, which leads to writing, and hills like white elephants. Symbols full of glide. Dimensions prolonged by pleasure. Orthogonals and paths. There are luminous birds that rise up and create a sense of camaraderie thanks to balloons. And the cost of it is nothing. It has no real existence. Things grow bold in a tumult of words, and there are sometimes new and open perspectives that weren’t there before. Like permission. And cake.

I learn by contraries what is hidden in cans. No one errs in the aspect they consider. Be it fencing, ballroom dancing or watercolor painting, there are, and always will be, a first time for everything. Being wrong. Being right. Being poised and logical. Being chemically imbalanced and full of curiosity. Generalities can be deadly. Said Michel Deguy. Sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, and in an irrefutable and contradictory manner, a pragmatic paradox takes hold, and clicks like a ratchet as it grasps the situation and gives it a nice firm turn. Pragmatism takes a certain pragmatism to be pragmatic. That’s the reality. Now I’ll give you the truth: there’s no such thing as an ellipsis. It’s really just dots, followed by nothing. And that makes it bulge with import. The ellipsis is a deferred existence, a raw openness of universal indeterminacy. A perfect state to be in, if you’re a writer, and it’s spring in Ibiza, and the waitress is coming…  

 

Personal Poem

8:30 a.m. April 21^st I get ready
For my eye appointment my left eye
Has a macular hole when I close
My right eye and focus with my left eye
Heads shrink and distort into Francis Bacon
Portraits. Breakfast is delicious and easy
Bowl of strawberries peaches pineapple
Under a big mound of whipped cream
Toast slathered with Bonne Maman cherry jam
6:00 p.m. I’m looking at tabletop face cradles
For vitrectomy surgery I have to keep my head
Bowed for a full week with 15-minute breaks
Following surgery on my macular hole there’s no
Date for that as yet meanwhile I read Dévotion
A poem by Michel Deguy which begins “Il faut
Que tu sois double pour être toi-même,” “One must
Be double to be oneself,” how do I pull that off
Pray tell I have to go now and blow my nose
Can part of me be someone else looking at myself
Actually, I think that happens a lot
There’s the wacko anomalous me and the sober
Apollyonic me gazing down from the sky
No no no that’s completely bogus there’s
The me me and the other me who’s not here
At the moment he’s at the Deux Magot café in Paris
With his head bowed reading Being and Nothingness
 

 

Northeast Of Spoonville

I did it by ignition. That is to say, by oozing teeth. What I had initially planned to be axiomatic and glass turned into a playhouse. But there was so much noise going through it, that I turned to neon for a better, languidly sedimented hour of argyle. I believe that certain things should be kept immoderate and wild, and that other, more modest attempts at prestidigitation should be congenially spread across the brain. A sorbet that we handle with our eager tongues I write forward into history by the fall of a northerly rain. This solves the bus problem. Thereby hangs a bivalve with multiple hats and a rhetorical helicopter. I can’t help but feel syntactical, and more than a little contiguous. Even though my reading glasses are engorged with Proust, I remain a fork at the dinner table, unbuckled and happy.

I am so there where the paper has consecrated my sad knocking against the door of heaven. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I came here with a purpose. I laughed at everything we said before going to see where the Sticky Willy blasted out of the ground with those tiny hair balls at its base, which isn't exactly why we went to see it, I believe there was something ulterior involved, a stinging evasion of our ultimate immersion in one another. And that’s why I came here. I came here to muse. I came here to stitch all this together in a way that might reveal the smoldering needs behind your eyes. I haven’t seen so many stars since that night in South Dakota, near the Hell Creek Formation where they found Stan, who now stands proudly erect in Abu Dhabi, 5.6 metric tons of Cretaceous bone. We may never see such heavenly folly again, not to mention the tightness of your jeans.

The upheaval that makes words move towards a liberation of such occasion is the sweat of angels. This provides the traction to cross any chasm or drive any forklift you wish to bring the disaster of civilization to light. I'm here for the geometry, yes, but also for a good dose of temperament. I like being famously anonymous. I like flirting with paradox. There is nothing that can’t be illumined by darkness or known by a lustrous unknowing. We seem what we seem to seem while seeming to seem semiotic. This floats beneath my construction, but it appeals to my conception of anomalous dispersion. I’m often reminded of that poem by William Carlos Williams about the broken glass in back of a hospital. Particularly the music of mosaic as it adorns a man’s lapel. I like drama. I like cats and upholstery. The grenadine is for Edith Sitwell. And the climate surrounding our knees is to embolden our play in a Quantum Orchard whose fruit exudes the charm of taillights.

We are next to me in an imaginary place. The melody of your maneuver while reading this makes us remember ourselves for a moment, and what we came here for, which is even now beginning to boil. There's something about what a handful of words can do that gives me a rather ecumenical feeling. It’s often what goes through your mind while you're waiting for something that blows you into a reverie of what it means to attain a state of well-being. Because your life becomes parenthetical. You’re sandwiched, temporarily, between all the monkey trees and stucco that brought you to this moment. The break-ups. The disappointments. The triumphs. The coups de grâce. The banquets. The feasts. The broken furniture. The stupid dances in Elizabethan garb at two in the morning. The slow boil of fascism. The cracks in the wall caused by a Tyrannosaurus rex tapdancing on your brain. Arthur Rimbaud showing you how to prepare a caravan. Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Paul McCartney sheering sheep. Miles Davis ripping the air into diamonds.

That moment when you openly admit to yourself there’s something pressing down on your mind. And it ain’t mosquitoes.

I owe a debt to agates and tar, to those things that dispose us to piquancy and blinking. My warmer voice speaks to a bitter time that joins this diffusion in chamomile and makes it palatable, if not seismic in its unadorned angularity. Whatever I intended to hoe in the beginning has blossomed into vulvae. I can’t say how, I can’t say where, but the binoculars have gone missing, and the glove compartment is a mess. I believe the piano may exercise its opinions with a more affirmative breath if we allow it to breed in silence. Those who spy a concordance may not be wrong about snow. It falls to the earth in patterns that abstract our literature with rust. Personalities just mean the House of Hardcore has a future. The real is always shifted a bit to the northeast of Spoonville. It’s what gives Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger its bullets and aim. That ontology of spirit we sometimes find in popcorn, an exuberance so soulful it takes a sewing machine to survive its proverbs, and a reliable needle to broadcast its thread. 

But we know. We know what antennas are. We know what hammers do. All it takes is a little credulity, some balsamic hardware and a little common sense to make a possibility happen to itself. What makes the possible possible isn’t falconry or applejack or the quiet morphogenesis of a wedding rehearsal as it journeys into the brawn of implacable decisions, the weight of which will generate its own necessary rebellions, and find its expression in the muezzins of Marrakech.  What makes the possible possible is the charade of the impossible. It is the kindness and attention we bring to the world that allows us to hear the ants as they whisper with pheromones in their subterranean galleries, the local foundry expressing itself in shadows, the chemistry of histogenesis flowing through the veins of the monarch as it generates its wings. A meaning remembered by undulation may cause a fever, whereas the birth of a gypsy banana tells the story of how to produce a sky-blue shirt, and leaves the body in a state of repose, unbuttoned and warm.  

 

The Untraceable Transference Between Suffering And Art

Michel Deguy writes of the untraceable transference between suffering and art. I think there’s something to be said for drifting. The feeling of it exhibits mint. The evident urgency in the shape of a mouth. This is my beginning it’s written in Cubism. I’m fluent in the art of getting behind things. And letting them swim in their polemics. I don’t know what kaolin is, exactly, but I can feel it sometimes, unfolding itself into a pizza. The placebo is gratuitous. This is my area of expertise. Is anyone here to watch my feeling wander? Is there somewhere where your hat will feel more salient? I can sometimes feel something crawling up my arm. I look, and find that it’s a beam of light, a tentacle of the afternoon sun awakening my tangibility. Everything has been so brash today. I believe it’s due to the monster in the garden, surfing the Adam and Eve birdbath.

The older I get, the more religious I get. It’s only natural. Sometimes nothing can be everything. I stand by my words, rolling a big metaphor into the oven. Similes go good with incense. But this isn't incense. This is flagrant thought. A page of testimony the words refuse to embrace. Life gets sloppy in old age. When words rebel, the best thing to do is to grab them like a bouquet and give them to a touch of aspersion. I will not block the ambush. Not if I’m flourishing, and sitting on a block of enlistment. This is how I sift through the strain of living and find a nugget of cotton. Emily sat down beside herself, and wept. With laughter. Nobody dreamed time travel would be so indigo. I interact with just enough ambiguity to make it constructive, and then I sit down to read a book on the topic of skin. Videos are ok. But I find books far more touching.

Everything seethes like a fugue on Rue Mouffetard, opening the ruby eye of a gypsy's kite. Meanwhile, here in the L'Hôtel du Vaurien the sideboard needs repairing. It is rumored that Rimbaud wrote a poem on it, and the letters burned into the wood, after the sheet of paper he was writing it on burst into flames. The poem is still readable, but it hurts to read it. Hurts in a good way. Is someone drifting toward this shoal? I feel a shadow emerge from the egg of a phantom barracuda. The temptation to collude with the absurdity of existence feels like a pulse in the wrist of a cynosure. Once it enters the bloodstream, it's hard to get away from it. You break down. You relent. You give yourself over to a force far greater than yourself. Which is called language. And is a serious abstraction, like track-and-field. Or leading a caravan over an Ethiopian desert.

There's a trick to determining whether something is real or not. You let it prowl around in your mind long enough to determine its weight and depth, and if it entices further thought with the hope of a definitive conclusion always dangling a little out of reach, it is most likely a piece of fiction. That said, fiction is frequently teeming with insights that bear the weight of ambiguity.  They will bedazzle a jury with the grayness of a fading morality. The truth nearly dies, verisimilitude bathes in uncertainty, and the judge is in a stupor. The law trembles with its own brushwork. And there it is, the framework of a negotiable reality. Hot air balloons drift over Albuquerque, and by evening we have a greenhouse with veins running through panels of bulging glass. Nitrogen stirs in the dirt and the fourth dimension drips with succulent euphorbia.

I never cheat at division. I divide things unevenly, this is true, but I do it with a nod toward the grammar of the situation, and touch the watermelon for luck. I’m wearing a green sweater. But I have plans to upholster my lips with a riotous hayrick in June. I’m all about sonnets these days, and garnishment and immaterial details. Do you understand the principle behind clapboard? Hint: it’s got nothing to do with clapping. Somebody told me I smell like lightning. There’s a reason for that. I still have a poem by Philip Lamantia cooking inside, teeming with innocence and airplanes. Innocence in a world this corrupt is a threat. It’s subversive. And deviant and hilly. Think of it: the Beatles playing at the Star Club on Grosse Freiheit in Hamburg, circa 1962. Or a war on war. Or a pilgrimage to the land of nonchalance. The noise of silence in a blatant spree of fuzz. A patch of snow with the blue of a neon sign glowing on it is anyone's guess. I thought that now might be a good time to bring it up. The question of romance. The heart of the situation. La raison d'être. Life. Meaning. Purpose. The lingering smell of sawdust after sawing a piece of grammar out of the air. And building a shamrock with a shank of syntax and a soft lament.

So: what kind of suffering are we talking about here. It’s the kind of topic you sneak up on, approach slowly, with poise and grace, and whatever stealth you can bring to the table. And tea. Tea goes without saying. Tea is essential. Any talk of pain is to be mitigated by whatever means. The wonder of it is its audacity, sharp as the blade of a knife, strong as Danish butter. Art, I mean. The forms it takes in prehistory, in caves, and the forms it assumes on Tik Tok. You tell me: which is better? An Earl Gray flavored with bergamot, a smoky lapsang souchong, or a mug of sencha? It tea fails, we have opium, heroin, stethoscopes, online dating, charming rascals, heavenly imagery, ludicrous perceptions, terrible metaphors, silk parachutes, and Billie Holiday on tap. This is a place of voluptuous pleasures. This is where we address the issue of pain. And kick it down the street. A little sleep can help mollify a sting. But it won’t replace the exquisite pain of an unmanageable beauty.  

Anyone adrift must know what it's like to move toward a future of scorched ideals. It isn’t long before a sense of futility bends to the dynamic of the situation, which is clearly birds. Has anyone ever yelled at you to get out? That’s not what this is about, in case you were wondering. No, this is about argyle. It’s like arguing with a flute. You can’t fight it with a banjo. You’ll have to use an oboe. It’ll keep you on your toes. Try writing a poem of devotion. While racing down the streets of Pamplona with a bull in pursuit. If you’re so inclined, I give you Lorca: At the forge the gypsies cry and then scream, the wind watches watches, the wind watches the Moon. Why so many watches? Because in Spanish it’s mira, mira. El viento mira a la Luna. The marvelous isn’t shy. But it is rare. Therefore, we should hustle the raw fact of our feeling as if it were coins of fire, and spend it on ice cream.