Twisted Colossus

Today, I would like to build a sentence of breath and sand. I will begin with a principle and end with an oath. If the age demanded a spoon I would give it a rag. But it's full of static and right wing radio stations. The color pink spouts mud from her veins. It’s how the severity of the color black is able to assume an aesthetic that speaks more clearly to our crusade for the towering subtleties of the highway. The sky leans over the horizon and brings out the textures of a more empirical reality than the one we were promised. There are balms for our blisters, theologies for our lotus. The cemetery confirms our anarchy. We draw analogies from the elasticity of pronouns. From one moment to another we do not know if the chisel is a more appropriate tool than the savagery of expectation.

When the jokes turned sour I decided to leave the group and build another sentence. This time I would use sprockets and paint. It was with great anxiety that I approached the canvas of life and began the lactation of coral turnstiles. I pulled some opium from an avenue of dead weather and offered it to the ghosts of hypothesis. They were most helpful. Together we were able to lift the sentence into the air and give it a push. It sailed into meaning where it spread its sails and creaked aloud when the conjunctions scraped against one another in that great mysterious ocean of space and time. 

The buckets are carried by Buddhists. The glue is heavy. Fortunately, most of the gas stations are open. My invocations rush aggressively into the night. The stars pour eternity on the world. The world continues to turn. Turning is eternal. It makes sense.

A patch of cloud walks past the moon. A shiver of bells enlivens a Christmas display. We hear an explosion, then, minutes later, sirens. Shards of glass reflect a ceiling of frescoed cherubs and wildflowers. A stethoscope is pressed against a warm chest.

Isn’t that what we’ve wanted all along, to perceive the reasons for things and events, to move them without the risk of the real and effortlessly understand them?  

Negation, deferred inasmuch as it is born from the abyss, causes the subject to bounce.

Christmas is an entirely different situation, requiring presents and generosity, a sense of community, a little hypocrisy, fakery, diplomacy, netsuke and spices from the netherworld.

Who wouldn’t want to travel in a rocket ship to Mars?

Palm Springs, maybe.

We can land by the side of a pool. The ghost of Bob Hope will greet us at the gate. He will bring us the balm of humor, which resides in the heart, alongside regret, which is cousin to the counselors of pain.

Maybe Bob Hope is a bad example. Maybe pain is a bad example.

Examples of what? They are examples of pain, existence, angst, the open enrollment of everything perceptible, the registration of the universe on our nerves, planets, stars, mezzanines and treadles of spinning potter’s clay. Open enrollment is a euphemism, a misapplied optimism that would also include its opposite, the flip side of the coin, a full spectrum of pain and pleasure and everything in between. There are torques and flywheels, hoists and trajectories. A closer description might be the Twisted Colossus of Six Flags Magic Mountain in Santa Clarita, California, which is a Möbius Loop roller coaster with a zero-g roll and a top gun stall.

The Palace of Pain beggars description. You must have pain, or a memory of pain in order to take its measure. There’s no morality to pain, though one may be provided, given sufficient time for thought and meditation. This is how pain fuels creativity, semantic cartography, and playing the harmonica. Sometimes there are symbols and ikons to help with the process. For example, a legato in a Beethoven violin concerto, or the hot dog rotator at 7-11.

There’s a shrine in the corner of the library. This is where sensations refine themselves into hieroglyphs of voluptuous energy. I could use this as an example, but it’s already in use. We should step away quietly and stand on the porch and listen to the rain.