What Are You Doing Differently?

Like vapor, you take a stroll through a circus of thoughts, and just like that, there you are, a poet in the making. If it's a photogenic life, there will be many opportunities to water the begonias. But if it's the life of a vagabond, begonias won't matter as much as hope. We all belong to something. The vagabond belongs to the staccato pulses of a syncopated asceticism. Luxuries fall out of a book like scraps of prestidigitation, humming as they become meaningful. The thunder cracks the air open like an egg of lightning, and the path becomes evident as silverware on a nonexistent table of steaming backbeat. A cavern, through the fiber of a moment, forgets itself and thinks about twisting a diamond neck into fingers of light. Narratives are inherently sepulchral. A life in segments describes itself as a hood ornament and that’s all there is to it. Nobody gets lost by choice. It’s not that kind of universe. The architecture is more like music here, and religions toy with the concept of evil. Time is combed with nails, and all the clocks are coocoo.

What are you doing differently, dear rags of thought, as slowly in your search for quintessence the heating we feel in our minds is beginning its overflow into speech? As humanity continues its descent into chaos, ideas glow like bumps in the brushwork of drunken calligraphers. Within the peremptorily mutable, we find - by virtue of meringue – a new form of writing better suited to the illiteracy of the age. Sweet being worthy of boiling, shall we get busy at our spices and try soliciting the slash and hullabaloo of the wind? I see a face in the window at midnight. I believe it’s the ghost of George Carlin. It’s one of those nights when the wolves are silent and the moon howls. Sometimes you can tell when a language is attempting to storm the Bastille and when it’s just resting on the page like a watermark. It’s a lot like putting on a shirt right after it’s been pulled out of the dryer. The distress or pleasure of the sensation will largely depend on any number of variables, everything from weather to sex to a plunge into Sanskrit. Yesterday these words were about deepening one’s experience of life, and already today they’re beginning to depart, and seek a new Eden with which to abolish, garden, and mend the world.

Writing is like folding clothes, except that the volcanos are active, and clothes haven’t been invented yet. The carpenter’s knee is outside, although the position of either knee remains to be seen, since the narrative made a sharp turn to the north and we all felt keenly the immediate ease of going in another direction. Many things begin with a coffee grinder and end with an appliance. This is not one of them. What we have here is a knitter with a collection of roots. There is the smell of rich black dirt in the air, and a clear potential for taffeta. Emily Dickinson sitting at a small desk, about the size of a nightstand. It’s not really a desk at all. It’s a table. But we’re not here to quibble. We take what the words give us. We see a new art begin to tell a story, using black like a font and blue as a means of escape. We call it the art of black and blue. It has a soft side and a tendency to gorge itself with words, as if were the ticking of the pillow and not the endorphins of sleep that cause most of our buffalo to erupt in soap. Writing isn’t a career it’s a calling. That is why the panacea dispenses with itself, and suggests instead an understanding based on drinking. Getting shitfaced. Because the Enlightenment is over, and nothing makes better sense than art, which needs us, and offers such sumptuous alternatives to algorithms and data structures. Things like twigs, and bacchanalia.

The Daffodil Pill

Only months otherwise moiré. These edges are a real pain to inflate. All I can say is: feel around under that little bell tower. To propulse oneself is to propose oneself. It is to experience a hike, ready, up to, and furthermore.  A sinister music calls this hard, nebulous diamond, a panacea. An emissary will be present to search the grounds when necessary. You may now send me all your money. You will be reimbursed tomorrow by twelve pancakes and a Mardi Gras. Here’s an egg unless ready while waiting for the overflow. Stand behind that white line. When the gun fires, run as hard as you can toward that big brick wall over there. Break through to the other side. It’s always good to lend yourself to a prodigal roadside attraction based on an understanding of how one conducts oneself in a jellyfish. I’m working on a design suited to the temperature of the water. Doing this is excessive while waiting for it to become metaphorically worn-out. I’m not ready for that. I’m bursting out with that breath you sent. It’s full of metaphors. Moiré. And vertigo.

Since blooming is almost ruby ​​although it’s splashing, let me greet you on the outside of this periphery and welcome you to the puzzle that is stretched nylon. Think of it as an underlying craft, raw and geometric. Or you can go beyond all the natural airwaves and find an allegory transcending thought. Learn to sew. Pick a thread. Choose a deadwood. Provide a library for the palm, and a punctuation for the fire escape. Jump into your fingers and collide with something poignant. Either scrap metal or a scientific drawer. The trickiest decisions are chestnuts. So, plow or hornet, search until you groan, and carry a fire alarm. Use your eyes to adore the chaos of your existence. Every day is a fable. Here is Bob Dylan warning everyone to open a gate. He looks worn. We could all use a vacation. Sometimes, that's all there is to it. Vacate. Depart. Dissolve. Sometimes the best solution is a solution. Wishing wells are for fools. The wise use cash. Learn to imply things. Inflate your vespa with semiotics. Oil your bananas hard, against the ribbon, where it smokes.

It’s hard to see, especially during the day. You know. The small one is all fields and shadows. But the big one is totally Toledo. Each window is a washing machine. Each door is its own skin. Give a salute to everything that running dares to inspire. I finally had to admit that Patti Smith could sing. The mayor gave me a donkey. But the janitor gave me an entire history. You will find it where the shadows are frozen and your birth is metal. It’s dazzling in a gerund. I struggle with chrome every day. I want to make a paper god for the arena. Can you keep a secret? I can’t either. I’m just some office lipstick without a plum. I can pull it until its apricot, but that won’t solve the rodeo. I've been rosily chapped ever since setting the chalk on fire. Ultimately, it all comes down to pills. The blue one ends the story. You wake up in bed and believe whatever they want you to believe. The red one offers the unvarnished truth. The black one means adopting a deep, fatalistic, and nihilistic worldview. The lavender one is for listening to Miles Davis. The burnt sienna one is raw with horseplay. The white ones are religious. You can play with reality all day like this if you use the right words. Use the wrong words, and no one will like you. You’ll be accused of all sorts of things. Misspelling. Misdirection. Wantonness. Cognizance. Hypostasis. Self-consciousness. You name it. I recommend the daffodil pill. It has a kite.

We were wrong. The last hours of the dinosaurs were worse than we thought. But let’s leave that for another day. Think, instead, of the Kelvin Wave, a warm-water surge that travels beneath the ocean surface rather than crashing on a beach. It’s the ultimate poem, a metaphor traveling stealthily through the unconscious and emerging in the mind not as a pressure but a treasure of transformative beauty. It's a feeling that becomes a tone, a moment that can be described as the appearance of cracks in an old wall, and which arouses an endless chain of molecular Beehoven. On sees time in knots, or anything else, whatever happens in the middle of words. This could be anything that drifts through a reverie like the perfumes of Honduras. It inspires the splendid mechanism of constellations in a planetarium of the mind to fold space into bizarre shapes, little sea friends whose tickles are a blessing, and whose forms awaken various uses when the idioms we choose to serve break the mailbox, and stumble forward into the realms of humankind, batting at habitudes.

In Mozart’s A Little Night Music, the sensation of mass is sublimated in the string section. It’s enough just to put up with futility in our day-to-day survival. It’s a leap into the void to think that the slower the rock the easier it becomes to build a new altitude. The same framework applies to the spine. Everyone loves a mimosa. But who gives a damn about a mustard seed in a time of endless wandering? For the time being, simply having the genitals to walk around with is quite enough to appease one’s inner turmoil. It's the rolling motions, the sound of scrapbooks opening and closing, because the ocean is right there, and it makes you want everything to sparkle with fine particles and big ideas. When was the last time you listened closely to the conversations of drunks in a cocktail lounge? No language was ever destined to collapse into obscurity. That is why the machinery of the poem played out yesterday in someone's mouth, and gave birth to Chet Baker.

There Are Places I Remember

When we visit a place, we don't leave it behind. Depending on the extent of our experience with it, we bring a significant part of it back home with us. Not just photographs and memories, but the spirit of the place, the subtleties of the air, the intricacies of its architecture, the flavors of its food and language. It brings about a shift in consciousness. It alters our overall perspective, our Weltanschauung. I have felt this most acutely in visiting Paris, France. In a visit of a mere five days that occurred eleven years ago, I still feel it. I feel the depth of certain emotions I experience when, for example, on a foggy late afternoon in August, I saw the four Evangelists from the Book of Ezekiel at the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. It was sublime. It was enchanting. It awakened depths of feeling in me that were new to my being. It was similar to the effect certain key poems have had on my existence. The opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” I had a friend that used to recite those lines at key moments and it always put me in a good mood. The grace and musicality of those first two lines followed immediately by the grotesque image of a patient etherized upon a table always cracks me up. It evokes the inherent majesty of life then punctures it with the ghastly reality of its horrific mortality. It awakens something both impish and noble, something ungainly and provoking in that strange art called poetry, which is a creaking carousel in a drugstore full of postcards published in The Twilight Zone. There are geographies of the soul, metaphysical frontiers that shield the enchantments of the sublime from the mediocrity of the mundane. The French have a word for it: le dépaysement. Being transported out of the familiar into the unfamiliar. I’ve got another word for it: odometer. My face is an odometer. Look hard enough & you’ll all the miles I’ve traveled. Rambled. Ambled. Gallivanted. Wandered. All while sitting in my chair.

Writing always feels clumsy at the outset. I find myself grabbing at words and finding entanglements and knots, semantic squeaks and faulty headlights. I fold it to get a shape like La Place de la Bastille, then sit back and comb my hair. I start to wonder what the hell am I doing? The more lucid things get the more obscure they become. I make a net of words, toss it into the void, then tug it in to see what kind of catch I’ve got, which invariably turns out to be something too calcareous to grow into zithers. In other words, words like to play tricks. They excel at creating illusions of reality, but fail hilariously in trying capture it. Is it possible that words, which are essentially hallucinatory, aren’t really designed to mimic reality, but invariably end by creating their own reality? To quote Emerson: “words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.” But do they always? Impoverish it, that is. Because the contours and consonants of any single moment are encrusted with a million other moments, and that is most certainly a sign of wealth. Each word is like a suitcase in which eternity has been folded into meaning like a cashmere sweater. It’s a never-ending pilgrimage, a shattering music with the heart of a chameleon. It’s awkward like a charging rhinoceros: faster than you think, and unstoppable. Unless, of course, you’re Hemingway. He always barges in at the wrong moment. It’s why I continually lose my place, and spend hours turning the pages, trying to find that moment, the one I haven’t yet written, which is gripping a fencepost in Wyoming as a bend in the road reveals the sudden splendor of haiku.

I remember a night in eastern Montana, nestled out on the prairie in a sleeping bag, looking up at the universe, the gazillions of stars moving across the sky. I couldn’t sleep so I spent well over an hour just staring at them, the stars, the constellations, the meteors and planets and eerie obscurities, eternity itself putting on a show for the benefit of anyone interested, and was enthralled to see those stars move, which, of course, was the planet moving, Planet Earth, my one and only home in the universe, enjoying its sensations, breathing its sweet air and wrestling with its propositions, its bristly grass and dinosaur bones buried deep in sedimentary layers of sandstone and siltstone and bentonite clay. The erosion over years revealing the skull and jaws and spine of a Tyrannosaurus rex, or the solid bony neck frill of a triceratops. It was a night in which I felt on a visceral level the immensities of space and time and how it all mingled in some of the tiniest of things, the petals of a blue-eyed Mary or the bright yellow flowers of a prairie thermopsis. The barnyard smells and musty woodiness of old-timey saloons, the scent of lavender in farmhouse kitchens. People often say that staring up at the grandness and infinite splendors of a clear night sky makes them feel small. It doesn’t make me feel small. It makes me feel huge. Not in a Trumpian megalomaniacal way, but in a mystical connected-to-everything way. In a how utterly strange it is to be alive way. To be in a body which functions without my slightest input, but does it with cellular interaction, & the wonders of DNA. I’m just happy to be along for the ride.

 

That Moment Before Writing

That moment before writing, butterflies in the stomach, like going on a date. The idea is close, yet the reality is so distant, it swishes back and forth like a wind brushing over the peripheral headwaters of a bizarre idea. And it’s slightly sexual, for reasons I don’t understand. Not at my age. The Age of Blurry Night Vision. The Age of Hazy Concepts and Coy Perversions. The Age of the Ages which is ageless as Be Bop A Lulu. A lot of the time I imagine writing down everything happening in the world on a daily basis. I use the word ‘everything’ somewhat loosely. The ambition is not quite so collegiate. It will not be a taxidermy of catalogued phenomena. It will be less methodical, more like pretty women on a Mardi Gras float. A sparkly decorum. A sanguine evening in Louisiana, somewhere on the outskirts of Lake Charles. A world whose moods are as volatile as the overall pitch and tumble of the voyage. The enlightenment is over. Things aren’t as rational as they once were. I want it to reflect the manipulation of needs by vested interests, people chained to an imaginary matrix of social controls. A landscape of data centers, rampant corruption, and Kafkaesque bureaucracies. This technocratic panorama of luxury and slavery and everything feeding this zeitgeist of genocidal madness. To find oneself in a moment of distress is to decide whether one wants to engage completely with life, or hold back a little, and write it down as quickly as you can. Writing happens in the intervals between events. It’s a place of redemption, an oasis of stillness amid the hurly-burly. Life is at peril on Planet Earth. Forests in flame. Rivers going dry. Wars everywhere. Who needs to put guardrails on a juggernaut of AI when the president threatening to annihilate Iran assures us his superintelligence will be adequate protection? Who imagined things would ever get his crazy? Here’s my idea: I write everything down, get it printed out, build a time machine, return to the year 1956, and submit it as an adventure in science fiction. It gets rejected. The letter from the editor reads thank you. We found the ideas and events in your story to be far too dystopic for our readers. How could so much evil exist within such a tightly framed time span? The billionaires you describe read like over-the-top comic book supervillains, too megalomaniacal and corrupt to be taken seriously. And all these societies that have succumbed to zombiedom are just too much for the average reader to invest their time in seriously. People walking down sidewalks staring vacantly at social media in a small telephone seems a little too convenient a trope for the levels of apathy you describe. It boggles the imagination to think a people would surrender so easily to such massive abuse. Your vision smacks of too much Philip K. Dick. We wish you the best in future writing projects, and would welcome a less horrific manuscript.    

The Solace Of Any Given Moment

We stir ourselves beside the strings while the movement establishes the home key. The time is ripe for syncopation. The fairy music is expanded. Everything sways. It’s all about leaps, and pirouettes, and ricochets. The kick of a resplendent chimera. What is suitable for the ceiling is electric for the soul. Water flowing through a paragraph in a carpentry of breath. Thinking in language coalesces forms and shapes peculiar to itself, a magnificent, swooping loop of a life. Things get idiomatic. Phantasmal, like Scheherazade, or a squall of nerves. Consciousness graces us with its presence as I try to wrestle my refractory life down on paper and give it light. My dream about denim pulls us there, dripping with nails.

Most gazes infringe on our privacy; those that don’t, are the ones behind our eyes. Purpose is neither wax nor impermeable. If I can figure out how to decontrol this language, I shall drink to the fruitfulness of its being. The solace of any given moment is its biggest thought, and I find that extrajudicial, if not semitropical.

Redemption scatters its reflections, before skidding around on my arm. Bohemia has its own biology, its own resonances, perceptions and scales. There are phenomena I sometimes steal for my circus, and hang from the ocean swells, finally conceding to the muscularity of thread. The spirit generates its own insistence, its own way of doing Cincinnati, and for that I am wireless, and happy.

Cubes are to Cubism what boats are to glitter.

Cause is to effect what pliers are to buckwheat.

It’s a way to explain oneself to the rotation of rubber.

It is somewhat erratic to feel aquatic. Though it isn’t required in order to play the glockenspiel.

Enthusiasm burdens the concertina with a strangely inappropriate music. And this is a cause of interior secretions, the happy adrenalin of an anticipated pleasure, the shape of a new dollar dressed in salsa. Gravity, meanwhile, gives us the communion we need to achieve a fresh new circumference.

Dada has a date with a clarinet as the letters of a foreign alphabet may conceive of various tactile charms in a linguistic context, and so dilate the parameter of our perception, that life’s inherent pungency scintillates in the sun’s shadow, divulging a vehemence that is new to music. Accidentals intensify the leaves of a passionate logic, as the seven tones of a chromatic invention create such contrasting folds as may prove to be latitudes of a fresh new hope. We’ll make their heads turn every place we go. Hamlet stands in the doorway rattling his analogies, proving nothing, but illustrating everything. We cannot stop death. We cannot stop war. What we can do is sublimate chaos by boiling our weltschmerz in a bouillabaisse of zany miscellany, and everything bad and everything good, everything noble and everything vile, rise to its level and boil, leaving nothing behind but the bombast.

 

Hibachi

If I sense the day is raw, I will wear it in the local bars. Our salt is that compelling. The twang, of course, is a French ochre. It gurgled it in its entirety through my analysis. I removed all the opinions, as I needed to give it some reality. I folded it into a signature flibbertigibbet, a brine of cartwheels, which ballooned into a new biology. This required some sifting. I needed to do something prophetic. I squirted a beard on my face, which made it biblical. Until we lure ourselves into listening, we’re really only loops. But if it’s quicker to abandon what we intended to begin with, then yes, it strikes my fancy to flap it around the cleavage, bouncing words off the kinks of the vista. Last night, for example, I dreamed I was lost in Illinois. Whatever makes a dump, I pondered the supply. I backed the language into cracks. A highly vocal freight hung in suspension, screaming, belching, and bending the bars of its cage. This is what words do when they embark on chocolate. Everything gets expectant, and thought starts to feel like an airport. Even a boat has gravity. It takes some considerable evocation to clap a token improbability across the tangible. I’ve heard so many the first time I met Bob Dylan stories it’s all I can do to remedy the time with intrigue. I must cling to obscurity. Because if I don’t, the words start feeling contrary, and invent their own hibachi.

Hibachi (火鉢) literally translates to "fire bowl" in Japanese. Chögyam Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves.” Gustave Flaubert: “the ordinary is extraordinary.” The best way to light some words on fire is to make a god of induction and reason from particular instances. Plunder the brain for quiet pleasures. Anxiety is a hive of false honey. I am at war with my anguish. This is clearly the wrong approach. It indicates a too-controlled canvas, and an unwillingness to flirt with anarchy in all of its unfocussed and glorious pleasures. Everybody hunts for a landscape appropriate to their predilections, even if it means a night in Bangkok. The immediate supersedes the eventual, the generalized, and the superficial. Acceptance of things as they are is the best way to get across a terrain of unexplored turmoil. When the hammer of conviction surrenders to the thrill of a beautifully finessed negative capability, the sky thickens with birds, the blood simmers with a magnificent perturbation, and the charcoal blushes with fire. 

Have You Ever Tried Combing A Chameleon?

Have you ever tried combing a chameleon? It gave me a voice, a finger I could slide back and forth. And time’s knives have ever since busied their blades, slicing space into minutes, and minutes into merit. The structure means nothing. It’s all about choosing wheels. Incongruity must also play a role. At the circus, we boil the dirt. Then we spread the sawdust, allowing our triggers to dream. Occurrences like this are called auroras. Tensions tend to swallow their own allegories. I saw morning flail in its emotion like garlic. It’s why I feel so sparkly and hirsute. A funny innocence haunts our singing, and so we twist our words, and put them in catalogues, to pound the public into veins. We trapeze ourselves toward crackling. And in the end, we find the beginning, from beginning to end. And fight our way back to the galaxy, where the stars are implicit, and the glue is entertaining. And then we unfurl. By which I infer eating, and slithering across the Missouri, hissing.

I crush the sweat trickles. It saves time. The ponderance pinned it to my mucilage. The table trembles with its own complexity. I spread it with linen, and the effect is calming. If it cracks, it’s not a table. It’s an exultation, sneezing our elation. Everyone is shouting halleluiah. Do you have a place for me in your voice? Caustic cactus into what? It’s something to consider. I can dig it if it hovers over our dilemma. It helps to map a strain with a black orchid. It’s revelatory to employ a volume against a wrist by whatever means. Imagery is tailored spit. The humidity in the conservatory is a little exaggerated. Furrows are a cause of raking. In this world, everyone gets everything backwards. We spin the beat until the rhythm pops, get down to business, make some faces, invent some abstractions, ignore the ultimatums, harness our words to a tender structure, let the traffic go by, sit back and listen to the moonlight spill its healing proportions. The air smells Gothic, and there’s everything a body could wish for waiting to happen in another lifetime.

This content isn’t ready at this time. But here’s what I have to say: nothing below the reel is a truer experience than crawling toward a seismograph during an earthquake. The real is never so reel as when it’s turning. I greet denial with survival. It’s a tin dimension that knocks on would. I snap at the mention of tendonitis. Right now, it’s quiet at the wharf. This sentence is tethered to a warp in space. That’s why it’s attracting so many clouds. The swirls in the armchair rouse our audacity. There’s always someone that needs the key to your laughter. The smell of opium mingles with the smell of elderberries. It can echo the gleam of a stethoscope. Sometimes I clank in the wind. Everyone sat beside it. The feeling. The feeling after. The feeling before. The feeling of gauze. And butterflies. We hired the best. The way to extend things via the sorcery of spice, and lace. Velocity comes in a stir of combustion, and they drill to obtain it. It’s time now. The map is folded and put back in the suitcase. The car is quiet. Until it starts.  The wheels are never so real as when they’re phantasmagoric. And the road goes right through us.