Hollywood Sugar

Is this pain private? No pain is private. How can it be? Pain feels private but it’s not. Emotional pain is surprisingly adhesive but in actuality it’s no different than a pronoun run amok in our personal biographies. Like all assumptions, it’s probably wrong. But sometimes being wrong helps us maneuver our words in ways that appeal to our sense of longhand. For example: here I am holding a word. Can you guess what word it is? That’s right, it’s pork chop. Which is two words. It takes two words to make one word because all connections begin with a plug. When pain is painted it flickers into the eyes like a giant handshake with God. We feel more than slightly Etruscan. We might feel Sicilian, or Nigerian, or echo a noise so emphatically that our granulations resemble the camaraderie of the stars and their perfect silence over the deserts of New Mexico. I can slobber like a cow if you’d like me to but I’d rather go on writing as if the sentences were leading us somewhere. Not enough has been said about cutlery. I think it’s only fair to describe time as a bear rubbing itself against a tree. There’s a story about this in the bungalow but I’m too weighted with matter to go and get it. All it takes is a bumped shin to remind me that the subject of pain is fraught with cramps. Let us engage the composition of pain by the scruff of its neck and take it somewhere abstract. There’s a despair so beautiful in its nihilistic distillations that even Dagwood would crawl through the echoes of his existence trying to find the secret behind all those dots that comprise the panels in which Blondie frets about housework and Beetle Bailey is chased by Sarge on the other page. I find most things painful but lately my moaning has assumed a greater resonance. How else describe pain than as a garden of signals and neuronal impulses that produce huge orchids of understanding, black and white and purple and yellow, their pistils yearning for pollination. We must court consciousness as if its answers were embedded in our minds like shovels exhuming the past in great steaming clods of past association, roots dangling, little bone fragments spilling out. Life is erratic. Revolt does little good, but it’s a start. Our actions swarm with it. Words vomit their meaning all over the page and the ether carries their fumes into the algebra of clouds. Eternal flux. That’s where pain is defeated. That cotton floating up there in corduroy and fat. Diamonds sparkle in the palace. The palace of pain. Whose subtleties of architecture fill volumes with the approximate language of existence. The brain reflects on its own reflections until the syntax creaks open revealing a book of shadows, stories constructing themselves out of tenderness and Hollywood sugar.