The Next Sensation

The Allegory of Bullets baffles me if I am outdoors with a gun. It is not a real gun. It is a poetry gun. Poetry guns shoot bullets of apparitional jelly. People get sticky, then transcendent, then roll over and laugh.

My backpack is stuffed with autumn. I am my own unofficial engagement ring. I inflate it, then float it above my finger, as if it were a potato, or a slender specimen of yellow crisis. I am proposing to the sky. I am proposing that we get married in a play, exchange pithy dialogue, and float clouds full of light and despair over the heads of the audience.

Yes, despair is a form of light. It is blue, of course, a soft blue light. Sometimes it trembles with life and its shadows spread on the ground, swallowing oil refineries and propagating intrigue.

Go ahead: I’m listening. If the power fails, speak louder. I will stretch the light of the candle into the next room, where Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein are playing cards.

Gasoline is an energy I secrete. It murmurs quietly as it swims to the surface of my skin and fantasizes a singularity of paregoric rust. The drugs arrive and include my propeller. I have camaraderie with a soap dish. I love the glow of French ocher in the winter. I love the hothouse imagery of Swinburne, the long postulations of Coleridge by the orchids. I feel soft whenever we exceed the dimensions of goldfish and become glamorous with destiny.

Whatever that is. It’s an aggressive word, I know that. Sometimes my eyes swim through its syllables and come out the other side tilted and revelatory. It’s hard to order breakfast that way. People tend to back off. Fortunately, I have a special glue that holds the paragraph together. It’s what I call begging the pigment to bristle, or configuring the geese along a wire of dangled echo. I rip the air in half and a rattan chair falls out. I sit in it and command empires. The day becomes eager. I strain to spit antiques. I linger. I snap rubber bands. The translation of a moccasin materializes in a pond of English. I parody its insults with a studio apartment and a ball of shouting ganglions. This is what we look like when we sip funny beverages. I loan a little butter to the melody of a birch tree and chat with a terrine of cherries.

Roots are fascinating, are they not? They’re a form of theater that occur invisibly in dirt. Eventually, costumes and dialogue appear in the form of an oak, or chestnut. My knee contains a certain force, but I do not pretend to know what it is. I move plastic objects about and belong to a circle of amusement created by fever and angst. There are days that I feel like a warehouse for worry. I inhabit a white dream that tastes of mirrors and knowledge and study the horizon for signs of correspondence. When it comes, I thread a needle and begin to sew Renaissance doublets and writing becomes a phenomenon not unlike boiling water. Meaning rises in the form of steam, condenses, drips, and the bouillon turns brown with wickedness and mahogany.

A scarlet thunder warms in the hot sauce of comprehension. I do not refute Reason, but I do like to swing it back and forth, then hit it with a pillow. A hammer of fog pounds nails of light into a wave of time. Time is muslin, I believe, which is an improvement over crying, which is lyrical.

The drama that is brown whispers of green in a patch of red. The substantive dissolves in the alembic of a preposition. It is time to go hunt for our food. We approach the tigers, who are scratching themselves as they come awake. We prepare for the journey. We load the camels. The tigers follow us into the next sentence, which is raining, and hinting at the shape of someone approaching from the other end. Shakespeare? Jim Morrison? Jimi Hendrix? I do not know. But if I were wrapped in a cocoon, I would be emerging about now, spreading my wings and swerving to meet the next sensation.