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.

Pink New Moons In The Green Room

 Seattleites are a lot like planets. On the surface, they’re all ice and mystery. But at their molten core, metals combine into mermaids and meat hooks glow on the retina. Occasionally, and quite often, strangely enough, in used bookstores, you’ll come across a maidenhair fern steeped in the dark, fertile soil of a Romanian pessimist. Approach them gently, cautiously, but not so cautiously you look like a stalker. And if you get lucky and start a conversation, use your inner radar, speak simply, speak wisely. Don’t act like Lord Byron. Don’t come off like Madonna. These are shy, suspicious, sensitive souls. They take flight at the slightest mention of you know who. They vanish in an instant. They leave you feeling like you’ve just had a quick visit to fairyland, or André Breton visiting Quebec. That charged little moment is now a musty section of moldy sci fi. The hush of isolation, and a copy of Emile Cioran. But if you’re smitten, truly stricken, and have the inner ambience of a Mongolian yurt, you can sometimes find them through a telescope, their celestial bodies pulsing with outer space nirvana. A cold yet eerily beautiful surface.  Glaciers. Jagged outcrops. Lush valleys, bushy and damp. In every Seattleite beats the heart of a latent, pre-millennial Californian. Who hasn't, at one time or another, wanted to shed their clothing and become a wet glitter? A bold new version of life. It goes on all the time. Pink new moons in the gloom room.

 

River Cruises On The Danube

River cruises on the Danube have been disrupted due to drought. France is being devoured by fire. Homelessness is illegal in Indiana. What a beautiful deposition I could make. Dyspeptic assessments of the modern age. Indictments of society as hot and perverse as anything I witnessed in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. And on my laptop, too. Meanwhile, what are you doing until the Humvees pass? How about a picnic? Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. When the ground is damp, and alligators swim in the streets, it is suitable to get dry in a place of searing beauty. We can create a gaiety quite easily. By playing one word against another, the parameters expand into exhilarating idiosyncrasies. Honeycomb textures on Mars discovered by the Mars Rover robot. A tiger shark floating in formaldehyde. Worth millions. An unmade bed, complete with used condoms and empty vodka bottles, shortlisted for the Turner Prize and later sold for 2.5 million pounds. Robotic dogs with tech-CEO heads. And there it is: that telltale roar. The sky screaming as it gets sucked into the engine of a Super Hornet. Blue Angels. Loud and acrobatic in the sky above the city. High-performance climbs. Breathtaking dives. Coming in low. Thanks for the tinnitus, boys. Why does our culture have to be so militaristic? I would’ve made a terrible Viking. I can see my ancestors across the river, looking at me sadly and shaking their heads. Their helmeted heads. The story continues until the water stops boiling and the rice falls silent. Most people experience significant everyday life, but they express it in different ways. It’s everyone’s prerogative to be at least a little weird. What are you doing right now to fill the room with delight? I could soon be in the shadows, amusing myself with theories of gray, and sprinkling your arm with a river cruise.