Philodendron

I invoke the rails of Kerouac’s Mexico to bend into gravity and unfold my life. I bombard anguish with the gray of sorcery, and yet it continues to be a value I need. The massive puzzle of life thickens. Our talk swirls about it, just before dinner, and my arugula salad. Which has tiny walnuts in it. For example, mosquitos pull my memory of Minnesota across a lake of inner imagining. I can smell it. It smells of raw sienna. It smells of bone black and disparagement and asparagus. It smells of dirt. It smells of the sorcery of the hothouse. What is not a sorcery? Anyone involved in the business of putting words to paper knows what it is to grasp the smell of structure and fill it with theatre and sympathy.  

I see in the philodendron a monad such as Leibniz described, a piece of eternity in folds of fragrance and waxy masses of pollen and confusions of twig and branch. My languor feels painted to my bones. Perceptions burn through my nerves and become values in my brain. The plough sparkles through the furrows of my reflection. I become a parliament of inner dialogue. I am the jerk that gives testimony to the confusion. I hang around among abstractions, inquiring about red, bathing it in cracks of thunder. I boil my wounds on the floor. I boil them in a big black pot. I collect blobs of phantasmal, parenthetical vertigo and spin them into jackknives. My life turns canvas. I roll the hugged crowd to Philadelphia. I dance around the bonfire. I jug my hare and drive a jeep through the ooze of a countless theorems.

Theorem and serum and my slippery romance with a suitcase. If infinity is ocher, then granite is heartfelt and butterflies conquer the goldfish.

Mindfulness sparkles among enigmatic mountains.

What if the mouth opens and a sentence flies out, rising and maneuvering through the air on black, membranous wings, and commits arrayal in an arroyo? Whose responsibility is it? Is it the responsibility of language? Or is it the fault of the Lawrence Welk show floating past Neptune?

It is the responsibility of speech, which is a form of color. This is why the parlor is called a parlor, and a parliament is a place for guano and radar.

The folds and wrinkles of the elephant testify to the shaping influence of gravity.

Language, like the elephant, lumbers among us, carrying our burdens, moving our logs, taking us to places deeper into the jungle where ancient temples await our renewal.

The gallop of a bone black abstraction echoes the embrace of a thousand moons in a sky of murmuring winds. I can see now why it is so important to venerate the flutter of the heart.

And why the philodendron has so many branches, and is therefore called a philodendron.

Say it: philodendron. You can feel it, right? Sure. That sweet vibration of consonant and vowel. Philodendron. Philodendron. Philodendron. Its syllables burning a hole in the bone black mouth of the murmuring world.