Attack of the Pink Balloon

I’m fascinated by the textures of the coffee table. It has to do with the way the light enters the room and touches the surface. The table is sturdily constructed of wood and was varnished many years ago so that parts of the surface shine in the light as if still recently varnished and others are more velvety, having witnessed the rubbings of many a sponge, many a dish towel.  

I see elsewhere things that appeal to my perceptions. A circle rolls into a paragraph and causes it to go into endless equivocation, thus resembling a voyage of persuasion zipped with participles. All my senses are engaged, including the ones still cooling in igneous rock. I hear a knife slice through onions, smell the color of ivory in a Tiffany lamp (a combination of jasmine and chattering fairies), feel the diplomacy of ice melting in a glass of root beer. The paragraph gets up and walks around, feeding me with so many sensations I have to sit down and catch my breath, rest my talkative bones. It reminds me of my days aboard the good ship Pins and Needles, the days swabbing the deck, joking with the first mate Aristotle Jones, and battling ennui in Arctic Waters. I’ve seen hurricanes as big as a woman’s nipple, and once I was brutally attacked by a pink balloon.  

A realtor had put up a bouquet of balloons to attract prospective buyers. The wind was blowing. The balloon conked me on the head. I went into a fugue state and bought a two-bedroom condo with brass doorknobs and more pink balloons.  

The heart is an engine of muscle and blood, Jupiter in a bathtub. Reason is only an instrument, a thing like a sponge. The heart pounds away in our chest, blood circulates, the water is warm, the faucet drips, an anonymous morality boils with airplanes. Life is silly. Life is catching. Life is contagious. I have a bruise that smells of pure energy. And desks and lamps and treadmills and walls.  

Think of me as a seismograph. I find paradise in pancakes. I can take a pound of sugar and bake it into an ounce of thought.  

I ache to believe such things. As a poet, I try to capture the worry at the airport. But as a pilot, I try to avoid the worry at the airport and go straight to the cockpit and become a poet. My suitcase is a dock crying out to the unknown. I gun the engines. I reach for the stars. We are air-born. Permit me to offer you a dish of candy. 30,000 feet below Iowa does a series of handsprings. Ohio sighs with a large emotion, brown and black and genealogical.  

I am a spell. My knees are angels my nose is a star.

I jingle when I walk gaping at the antics of summer, and I may seem distracted, and I may in fact be distracted, but I know a hawk from a handsaw, and that mushrooms gather humidity into their being and incorporate it into their flesh, living, as they do, on the decay of other matter.  

When meaning deviates from its course and swerves into unbridled heterogeneity, there is consolation in the immaterial as our aesthetics burn the empire down and we hang from the ceiling stitched with headlights and dates. Later, when the loops arrive, we can penetrate one another, blur distinctions, and bubble in buoyant sympathy like pink balloons.