An Alpaca Morning

When sensations are converted to words, they become iodine. They become cartilage and bone. They rattle. They dry into sidewalks. They extrude paradigms crackling with calliope ghosts.

Would you like a slice of sexual algebra? A piece of fruit? There is a Cézanne still life above the sideboard. It is full of fruit. Help yourself. Though you will have to eat it with your eyes.

Is there symmetry in space? I don’t know. How could there be symmetry in space? Space is not a thing. Space is a no thing. Or is it a thing indeed? Space is the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Harpsichord.  

Reflections on the surface of the water display the loom of the weather. The gray sky sighs with the dreams of birds. Picasso stirs a pot of beans. Autumn floats into winter. Winter is now ubiquitous. You cannot shoot winter with a shotgun. You can only endure it. Butter a hope with a long seclusion. Chisel a fiction out of the air if the air is willing and the chisel is real. And the winter is long and the days are short.  And all of your pronouns are harnessed to the syntax to a sparrow.

I admire the grandeur of the asterisk. Who cannot tremble at the sight of such a little star?

Structure defines. Chaos excites.

The bow of the violin apprehends the strings and seduces them into sound. It sings of beads of water on a black table. It sings of consonants pumped from a well of vowels. A wisp of incense unveiling a current of air. A blue van backing out of a 7-11 parking lot. The creak of an elevator in an old hotel. A tidepool loud with color. Buffalo on a voyage to the stars.

There is a charm in imperfection. Red hills perforated by a blue sky. A tug followed by the ghost of an atmosphere. Flaws in the ice of an alpine lake. A bit of blue plastic sticking out of a white drawer. The myriad predicaments of a gas station on Highway 99. Seeds. Pinochle. Topaz.

Palpitating secrets mark the beginning of indigo. The ocean washes over the wheel of the ship. There is a spectacle of blue at the end of this paragraph. No one knows what it is. It could be Hamburg. It could be headlights pinned to the night.

The bistro is imbued with rumination. Outside, rain percolates to the roots. Thin black branches silhouetted against a gray sky, tangled and complicated and delicate, like nerves.

Nerves are nervous according to the ways of the pumpkin. This is how art answers the enigma of sand. All those fine little ripples shaped by the wind. Mountains ablaze with an alpaca morning.