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 not reach the end of À la recherche du temps perdu. 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.

 

My Life As A Ghost

I learned to swim in Wisconsin. It was the 50s, and everything glittered under the rigid guise of a false prosperity. It’s a lot different now. Nothing glitters. The United States, grinning ear to ear like a Times Square con man, has walked away with everyone’s dream. And left us with a simulacrum. Freedom on a layaway plan extending endlessly into a nonexistent settlement. Eternity in a can. Why does deviancy so often feel like salvation? Is this wrong? Hallucinations aren’t dreams, they’re more like destinations. The 60s is a lonely place to be in 2026.  Regrets prowl the parameters, taunting us with scruples, blasting us with salutes. Have you ever tried bending a spoon with your mind? I tried it once, and it turned into a fork.  

Clouds are structural: the variables they elicit are round. Therefore, never count your mittens before they linger. If I crashed through a mirror, would I enter the domain of my other self? Or would I find myself looking back at myself with the same lost look? Splotches and blots always have something intriguing in their disarray. I’ve learned to respect the accidental. Anything inscrutable, yet obvious as a mouth. When I think of structure, I think of a pitcher and bowl on a North Dakota farm. I think of the silhouette, at sunset, of a deserted house. A sad image. One of the saddest. And I never got the real story. Where those people went.

I flourish most when I’m doing the least. The rest of the time, I diversify. I like the anonymity of the savannah. It’s where I can walk with cheetahs to the beginning of existence. This is the stepladder at its incidental best. I rise, and touch the ceiling with my brush, trailing the off-white chatter of cherubs. Such are my diversions. Here’s my idea of a paradigm: we build muscle together, we slather together. And by studying the subtleties of linen, I can warm my words in their hypothesis. 

The rattlesnake redefines wildness each time it coils and flickers its tongue. I remember when poetry mimicked the imposition of life with a clash of cymbals. And people politely listened, as they do now, but it’s different, and considerate, and nobody understands my hill. Outside the resistance, the harmonica is a romance. Inside, where it counts, the harmonica is sly, and cognac, and opens like an umbrella. Which is supposed to be bad luck. But I don’t think so. I love umbrellas, they’re like portable houses. And in defiance of rain, I learn to love the rain.

Feeling what I feel about aluminum, I have to ask: what has robbed us of our falsetto? What’s happened, indeed, to the entire chorus? Did you know the Supreme Court is across the street from the Folger Shakespeare Library? I don’t know whether to think of that as a latent defect, or just plain ironic. I see a voyeur that sees me. Sometimes I spy on my own life. Just because your feathers are a little ruffled, it doesn’t mean you can’t fly. Today’s question was: what have you noticed recently? There’s light in the bedroom in late afternoon. The Cascades are eerily bald. And I’m a lot clumsier than normal. Maybe because I do everything now at the speed of sleep. And when I put down in writing everything that bounces around in my head, the feelings I get about cardboard get really French. I’ll say this: consciousness is never monotonous. It’s not the same as holding meat over a fire. It’s more like feeling haunted by the ghost of yourself.

 

The Struggle Inside

Iconostasis. What’s that? Windows to heaven. Icons in an orthodox church. Mirabilas.  Apocalypse. Metropolis. Hippopotamus. These, too. These produce images. And images have questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? I don’t know about you, but I’m buying a ticket to paradise. Wherever that is. I think it’s one of those things that only exist in poetry. Meaning women in bodice skirts, white linen blouse, embroidered aprons, and black leather shoes doing the Hambo. James Joyce sipping oolong in Trieste. Epiretinal membrane, a thin, translucent layer of fibrous tissue or scar tissue that forms on the inner surface of the retina. Here’s looking at you, kid. Sometimes, I seem to be living in the past. There is some validity to this, if we may be permitted to include memory in our pataphysical toolkit. When desire goes unsatisfied yet maintains a sturdy intensity, it begins a mode of seduction. Which rarely, if ever, goes well. Not a good optic, as they say. It’s always the heated and awkward poems that end up back in the barn, transmitting elegies in long bellowing moos. The wilder ones jump the fence and take off for the prairie. And end up passed out on the floor at an open mike in Larame.

Translation is an art. Spin a pumpkin, get a fjord. That sounds corny, but I mean it. The very air has grown taut. There’s a poem in it. I just have to find it. I can smell it. It’s giving off an odor of popcorn mingled with Arthur Shchopenhauer. There has just a been trauma. Humanity has taken its mask off. It’s a total mess. What happened to the eyes? The expression looks so utterly sad with a tinge of narcissism. Its expression is flagrant, and yet timidly immaterial. The explanation is a reverie regarding a hiatus overlooking the anatomies of some modern specimens, specifically one with the teeth of a saw, and the other with a banana-shaped chest and a head like a forest of blurry animals. The texture is rough, like a bad joke at a Hungarian wedding. It takes a lot of motion to make any frame contemporary. And brother, this joint has gone nuts. Zombies on scooters. Academies of ache. Odysseys of ohm. Electrical resistance. Poetical nonexistence.

Sometimes the best solution is to plunge right ahead into the conjectural universe. I despise the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist.’ It shuts down conversations. It shuts down speculation. We live in a speculative universe. The narrative is old and beyond my comprehension. It burst out of nothingness, like a pair of old work boots tumbling out of a closet. A holy ghost in the pocket of a wool coat. Planets colliding with comets. Ideologies colliding with reality. There is nothing linear about it. It’s 100% nonsense. Nonlinear as a Moroccan goat in an argan tree. Human voices male and female singing Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus in a Gothic cathedral. Everything is a sunset sandwich served on a platter of snow. Meaningful as a slap to the face. Silly as a translation of a reclining figure in a state of lassitude. And twice as redemptive.

What is at issue is what causes change. The struggle inside. The contest. With yourself. I’m always running a few steps ahead of my ego. The ego is an egg of remorse. The id is hid in a lid of Bonne Maman cherry jam. An officer of the law flickering inside a prostitute. No longer things, but what happens between things. Liberation is a libation of the spirit. But does it truly exist? Nothing exists with total autonomy. How could it? Only poetry can do that. Especially when it cracks its worrying eggshell head apart and supplies the world with its magic string and troubadours. What, at root, is the reality contemporary to us is hazy as the hazard we can’t see until it gets here. It’s always like that now, crazy and unpredictable. An ongoing dissociation of chilly euphemisms. The inviolate crust of a nitroglycerin thought. To each his natural own. It takes a lot of language to produce a raspberry. A real raspberry. With a justifiable handlebar and a nebular milieu. The deafening cheers as the wrestlers enter the ring. And the words are put in place. What we’re talking about. What we are after. And for which we are instrumental.

 

The Forever Dark Of Whatever It Is

One of the strangest characteristics of my life has been a tendency to do things that serve no purpose whatsoever. Poetry, for example. Poetry can’t provide fuel for the engines of transport and industry, make spackle to fill a crack or smooth a rough surface on drywall, mint money, power a boat, defend the innocent, prosecute the guilty, teach judo, manufacture socks, shine shoes, hold en electrical charge or resuscitate a heart. Poetry does nothing, and it does it really well. Its closest approximation toward a practical application is drugs, chiefly those of a psychedelic nature. It’s not really great at alleviating physical pain. It can be applied with some notable success in the area of mental and emotional pain. It shares a great deal with its far more successful cousin, music. Music excites the emotions. Poetry excites the intellect. Most people prefer to excite their emotions. Only a few give a shit about intellect. Why would they? What has intellect ever done? If you want to see what people think of intellect, bring up Spinoza at a union meeting or a drilling crew on the Texas plains. Why Spinoza? I don’t know. How about somebody more homegrown, like Thoreau. He made pencils. And grew beans. Suffice it to say, that when it comes to achieving nothing in the realm of the pragmatic, poetry is supreme. And this is useful in ways that elude the one-dimensional. The literal. The down-to-earth. The empiricists. The doers. The logicians. The rationalists. The realists. The skilled. The proficient. The competent. The well-adjusted. The masterful. The able. The accomplished.

That said, I would argue that phenomena that purportedly does nothing, does everything. It drills the air with spirals of inquiry and lets the sap of correspondence fill buckets of amber rhetoric. It conjugates the raw and incorporates the incorporeal in postulates of bone. It animates thought and stimulates the bees of the invisible to pollinate the mind. It finds beauty in squalor and music in appetite. It feeds on darkness and gives a habitation to the dead. It does this by doing nothing. Because without the weight of machinery, without the burden of intent, the spirit finds its joy. The cage opens. The panther stops its pacing, and plunges into the world.

Poetry, which revels in enigma, in the synergy of the indeterminate, in the energy of despair, thrusts us into the very heart of existence.

Put a symphony on the turntable and this will happen: restitution, illumination, and grace. Put a book on the turntable and this will happen: nothing. But put your eyes on a sentence and watch what happens: the words will carry your attention to the very end. The end of the sentence. If you lean forward a little, you’ll see where it was leading. A deep abyss. The air is warm and smells of sulfur. Breathe it in and you’ll have visions. The gods will communicate with you. You will write it down and try to get it published. When you’re feeling a little more sober. And a nice hot shower has restored your nerves to a glassy quiescence.

Choice takes initiative. Sometimes we call it prediction. Sometimes we call it weighing our pros and cons. Take a look around. The surrounding force, present on a plateau, requires no authority to breathe. It’s telling you something. It’s telling you to decide. The scales on which I base my work are highly sensitive. They’re capable of measuring masses as small as one yoctogram, which is equivalent to the mass of a single proton. These devices utilize undulating vibrations, where the tissues are flaccid and withered. A piece of time sits beside itself with brilliance. A kangaroo hops by. Turn your gaze toward what lies just above. The reel is real. I know what it looks like. It unwinds in images on a screen. People travel through a beam of light. They refine themselves beyond your reach. And the resilience we have highlighted in their favor pulls us out of ourselves. We walk into our future hoping the decisions we made are there to greet us, shabby, tattered, dirty, doesn’t matter, they were our decisions. We must honor them. Or ignore them. And buy a ticket to Rio.

I wonder who, today, maybe just minutes ago, stepped out of a bar and decided to become a poet. A hearty specimen of humanity like Gary Snyder, or an uncannily sensitive woman with eyes the color of sherry, standing in a garden of buttercups and heliotrope. Or were you born near an open-pit iron mine in Minnesota and became Bob Dylan. I can’t imagine being 18 at this moment and discovering Charles Baudelaire. Architect of my fairylands, I made – according to my will – under a tunnel of gems – a docile ocean drift. I heard a loud, percussive noise. And the sky dropped its shadows on the sad numb world. Decadence is a gift, and it comes in many forms. Hungry ghosts follow its earthy scent. What appealed to me was simple. The ability to find beauty in squalor is a terrible and wonderful power. There are pearls that allow our inner being to hold the sky like a bowl. Even when we’re standing in shit. Listening to the gossip of the stars. It’s a serious narcotic. There’s a science to it, and it’s maddeningly unscientific. There are no diplomas for what amounts to a trance. Just a push from behind. And a flair for parables.

Why should there be one time you have to be more happy, or miserable, than at any other. Sometimes it’s just a matter of standing around waiting for things to happen. Emotions shade in and out with nothing to anchor them. There is, supposedly, a guardian spirit watching over us. I stood once in a cave looking at Ice Age art and it felt fulgent and fundamental. I could feel the presence of something primal. The pull to commitment. And the dive into what that means. Whether something is real or conjectural is a failure to realize the relations between all givens. And so I crawled back out and got a sandwich and a glass of beer. Everything is personal. Even kelp. It doesn’t always need eyes. Just a repertoire, and a fireside. Reality is always a burden because it sets limits. There’s no limit to intimacy. Which is what makes it so dangerous. Follow a strand of thread Sumerian red. The next step down is critical. This is the forever dark of whatever it is makes the sun roll off the tip of your tongue, and plunge ahead into whatever conjectural universe fills the heart to overflowing with ermine and toadstools and stars.