Möbius Dick

Here’s some thermometer thunder. You can muzzle the muzzy but you can’t gratify everyone so why even try. Here’s a calliope cocoon and here’s a dusty daub of speed. I can feel it in this body I’m walking around in. I’m religious about mountain climbing. I’m also afraid of heights and have never climbed a mountain. But I’m still religious. Let’s say I’m religious about mountains and leave it at that. Glue me to a prospect overlooking a beautiful temperature.

Death is a private affair. An unconditional lucidity. Frog plop in a woodland pond.

We all love a good fantasy. Here comes one now subversive and gray. Your age is not your actual age. Whatever diplomacy you bring to the pinnacle in Nietzsche’s toolbox our life together is walnut. Push the drum kit closer. We all want to hear that rhythm, that splash of cymbals in the ovum of time. We endure the world best by opening to it. The painter’s chin has paint on it.

Cerulean blue.

I fall into employment when the car door opens. I drive. I gnaw at a garden vegetable. I play with the air. It impels reflection. I play with money. It impels oligarchy and musk-ox.

Ages makes us sag. But I can mime the virtue of patience by standing in line minding my own business. I have a load of napkin rings, potato chips and pretzels. I have a door carved by a Viking sculptor and the sound of a saw screaming through a plank of wood is the bone black dissonance of a cognition modeled on the asymmetry of the hippocampus and amygdala. I’m flourishing here as a painter. I feel the sympathy of earth in a loaf of bread, how the universe is flourishing and swollen and each star is the boil of plasma, electrons, protons and alpha particles with bad breath and nothing to else to do but wait and see what God is going to do next.

Meanwhile the universe shines monotonous as a circumference that is everywhere and whose center is nowhere. Although I do believe matter and energy are one and the same cartwheel. You know? Something like the smell of snow, or an X-ray revealing the bones of a prophet. Words have that power. This very minute your eyes are holding my language as I get off this stool and drag a bundle of magazines closer.

I’m writing a play about a man and a woman on a raft negotiating the rapids of an eyeball. It has neither ending nor beginning. I call it Möbius Dick.

Lord let the obloquies give me power till the realism gets here. I feel you under my skin. I can hear the estuary stroll into a melody and moo like a sparrow at high tide. Wood speaks to wood. I flex both my arms in a greenhouse and power this introspection with the steel gonorrhea of a rubbed astronomer. An infinite jest enriches our confusion. A little nasty fondling here and there is good for the soul. My brain feels gray as the fur of an old cat walking over a banana and a pineapple on an operating table. The ethicist mumbles something half asleep in an armchair, a statement bewildering as a tumor, leg with an odd bump. Dusty old book cluttered with hymns. A jar of pickles.

Rattlesnakes aren’t cruel they’re just rattlesnakes. Morality doesn’t exist in nature. Grace and energy belong to the realm of the highway. This is where words and people collide creating sparks. And where, sooner or later, people might gradually perceive the universe in a single human voice.

Paper Revolt

I want to jingle when I walk. Experience shattering visions of alpine bears. I want to talk about the endless road of existence in a forlorn attic. New adjectives will have to be coined. I want to sit cross-legged in Rimbaud’s grinning bones. I’m strongly attracted to everything and feel it exploding in my head. Nothing needs decipherment. Daylight ate my shadow. I’m capable of great distention. I understand a chair by sitting in it. I feel the great chain of being in my right thumb, and drop to the sandy bottom of Lake Eerie leaving behind a residue of words, syntax crashing around the soft breast of infinity.

I feel the lift of a powerful emotion, I don’t know what it is, but the walls are burning down. Start your engines. Metamorphism swarms with energy. I see soap in a brown soap dish and think of digging a deep hole for a convocation of listeners. Sawdust trees. The walk will do us good. Genres can be mingled.

There’s a dusty frontier town in my show. I’ve rigged it for salvation. I’ve polished the binoculars. Constancy falls into a trance. The candles are burning aloud. I hear the flames screaming like spots on the sun. I see an angel dribbling from a Christmas tree, the shadow of a vagabond merge with traffic, people scattering on the other side of the river, though a few are wading into shallow and rough water. Shout your lungs out. Tell them to stop. The implications are curiously dexterous, like the shapes in a Chicago nightclub, or a paper revolt.

I wear adversity like a garment. Gravity with a henna collar. I gaze at the wall. If we can extend the life of the grass, we will feel the ascension of angels in our hiccups. Do you believe in ghosts? Ghosts are a good idea. Please appoint me head of some confusion, any confusion, doesn’t matter which, doesn’t matter where, I’m just confused.

It’s always tempting to accommodate one’s illusions. They’re all we have. Sometimes it’s cruel not to say yes.

Let’s explode the matrix to smithereens. My chaos is contagious. Let’s pump some feeling to the surface and see what it does.

Seattle is a damp place. Everywhere I see concrete walls covered in moss and lichen, like walls of opium in a dream where I feel myself converging with the sparkle of ultramarine, and everything is taken in with gratitude and humbleness. We see birds on the ground, heads cocked to hear worms. Nothingness is underrated.

I’ve carved my reticence out of a bullet. But it’s not working. It looks more like brocade for a thyroid gland than an infringement on my self-esteem, or a proverb with a reed mouthpiece.

I’ve detonated my regalia. What good is it now? Your presence here is much appreciated. Please know that.

Here I am galloping through another sentence. I like to bang around in a bong, a tube of air containing a totem of vowels, all the vibrations you’ll ever need to see the fog in my blister. It comes to us by revelation, a narrative tornado tearing our conceptual greenhouse apart, yet strangely leaving all the orchids intact. I guzzle some whiskey and write a letter to the city council. We’re all pulling a great weight, but here’s a water pie to make your day go better. It gleams like a chisel on the wall. A hit song thrashing around in a jukebox. It holds my sweat in a stone. Exploration is a must. You can’t go through life without exploring anything. That’s why we’re here. We’re the universe exploring itself.

A door opens to another dimension. I’m wearing a finger of ice, a necklace of tin soldiers. If we have enough salt we can assemble a star in a garden of nerves. We have seclusion in a farmhouse. And except for the onions, it’s easy enough to endure one’s personality. Throw yourself into it. Don’t be shy. Walk out of yourself, tame as a TED talk, and tell everyone about yourself. Tell them what time is. Tell them that time is nothing more than a little upholstery, something to soften the steam of intuition at noon when the guano changes color and the innocent come forward to be initiated in espresso. That it talks to us in a forward-driven story and ends with a monolith humming “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

That it eats the sky at midnight and coughs it back up at dawn, tyrants and derelicts alike rising to touch the gown of morning, brush their teeth and do what they do, go where they go.

How I Came To Be

During WWII my father had a mid-air collision while piloting a B24 bomber. This happened outside Omaha, Nebraska, where my father was posted. He was a flight instructor. The plane was new and hadn’t been painted yet. It was highly reflective and nearly invisible. He was hit by another trainer. Despite the fact the tip of his wing was crumpled, he managed to land the plane safely. Since this incident occurred a few years before I was born, it’s both liberating and weird to imagine how close I came to not existing. It’s also a reminder of the fact that I owe my life to WWII. It was when my father was late stationed in Denver, Colorado that he met my mother, who was a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

The details of my entry into this life, this planet, this space and time continuum, are completely random, as is identity itself. I’m a mélange of culture, history, language, geography, food, technology, and social conditioning. Had a madman in Germany with a bizarre talent for moving people with his vociferous, Teutonic rhetoric and a need to conquer other countries not come to power and embroiled the world in war I would not be here writing this paragraph. Had a species of ape not begun to walk erect millions of years ago I wouldn’t be here. Had a planet not formed by accretion from a solar nebula I wouldn’t be here imagining what the planet looked like when it was born. I’m sure it was a pretty baby. Planet Earth is the most attractive planet in our solar system. But I’m biased. I live here.

If I go looking for a core identity, what I find is flux and fluidity, a continually shifting agglomeration of cells and microbes, a riot of attitudes and perceptions that create a semi-coherent personality. What I don’t find is a solid, stable, enduring identity with a definable character folded into my body and glowing out of it soulfully like an inner patio light. It’s what we imagine when we look into one another’s eyes during a romantic moment: who is this person I’m in love with? Is there a soul in there? There must be!

I’m more inclined toward the Buddhist outlook: the true self is a not-self, what they call Anatta. Anatta is the doctrine of non-self and espouses the notion that a permanent self is a fiction. It’s a useful fiction, but one we create ourselves, quite often when we’re not even aware of it.

Notice how easily I use the pronoun “we.” What gives me the authority to speak for humanity? Nothing. But I do it anyway, partly out of habit, and partly because I can. I find myself hurled forward by the momentum of words. Language is powerful. It’s what crackles inside us during our waking moments. It’s the bonfire that pushes the darkness back.

Imaginary Solution

The pharmaceutical garden gnomes handspring through my brain. Despite the clatter I believe the dirt. The grip of cognition verifies the twinkle of paraphernalia. I greet the joke beneath the gleam of its smile. A prowling acceptance folds itself into Liverpool.

Bingo in a nipple which my gravity neglects. We accept the virtue of my eating. I drum beside the artist’s sag. Sift the jingles in your sternum if you want to find the satori of the thyroid. It’s indicative of scorn to cry along the exploration of our inner gardenia.

The texture of my aim was rough before I had intuition. I oppose nothing. I jug the studio in blue. I chronicle birds and change what I can. My chew is the kiss and shout of all things perpendicular and walking. Wall the idea in a wild disarray and it will validate the polo in a trickle of inseam.

I’m enthralled to have pinned this argument to an abalone. England will carry our history into the future. If there is a future. They’re doing to the fiddle what the fiddle did to Paganini. I mean to touch the firmament when the steam rises from the flash of my nerves.

The thickening of my succotash allows the evasion of my hurry. No balloon requires an insinuation. I sing the speed that so intrigues our realism. This wheel on the ground this bone black engine this spout of opium are all the rationale I need to sit by a brook and think. I thunder reality.

Gothic water intake valve. Sauerkraut book on a warm blue chair. I’m a whispering gun. A month of amphetamine in Vermont. An open flame of consciousness throwing language at an imaginary solution.

Joke String

Ground. Leave inquiry among the leaves. Endure a bashful temptation.

Symmetry produces my shoes, but my shoes are nuanced and ancient. The geometry smolders like a lawn sprinkler smeared with Gauss distribution, which is totally independent of the empirical subject and laced by two determined pairs of hands appearing out of the darkness.

There are signs that gravity is asymptotically safe. Fasten a flash to the nether end of a red giant and watch it flame into space like a busted guitar string. The wool is your point, even if it’s a little theoretical. You can repair this goldfish. It’s not a perception. It’s a journey.

Jug clatter. Fill my murmur. Door that I believe. Folds. Eye rub. They fiddle a kiss who fountain scales. Twinkle like a lip.

With a word on it.

The appeal of mindfulness is in its complete highway, an umbrella in the backseat. This is where the trance meets the current. A whistle churns the spirits.

Rattle. Joke string. Accommodate your swallow. The skull has a life in it. Technicolor glockenspiel baby.

Cocoon. Dusty artist. Painter dirt freely exploded.

Fathom. Gleaming pain. Greet it organically.

Picasso lobster piano nailed beyond the convoy. Music in a metal. I’m sending you an alchemy. Plays. Infantry figures. Dribble perception and dig. Chemicals diffusing in demurral. A club clatter a wheel with effective sounds on the gravel. Motorcycles. Lights. Crumpled beer cans.

Virtue. World spout. Red flickered to ochre. Stroll. Drum gravy. Sophisticated snow chair. Abalone finger which an opinion explains to be a platform for the enactment of steam.

Fish before fish crush the distortion.

I feel bronze. Meat during science gets scraped to gristle. And then a mitten is written into space. Break a fast and rob a pratfall. Falling in love is a new pavement for the engines of groan.

Great music has to be scraped out of the air. Or pumped.

Coaxed, cajoled, rubbed, persuaded, magnetized, pleaded, begged, beguiled, chiseled.

Delegations of pearl undertake the lassitude of ash. If space is within space, then spatiality must have something to do with Le Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval.

This is my electric yellow pin. I’m licking the power that is nature. I smell sweet from my locomotive breakfast. Causation causes itself by eating the glitter of enigma.

A cricket singing from a high edge of involvement exclaims nothingness, which is now a nail in the two-by-four of a sentence cycling around a man’s tongue.

String theory states that all matter in the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings of energy and in the long run will redeem us from the old ideals, which were beginning to smell like icebergs. Locke believed that makers have property rights.

What a joke.

Nobody has property rights. All we have is one another. Pluck that G string, and sing a tune of dark blistering energy.

Snow Bump Whistle Burp

Personality is a limestone waddle. Piano keys in melodic thunder. Chiaroscuro morning. Turpentine. Catalogue sputter. Pathos hibachi propelled by sizzle. Exultation points wrapped in mass. The dark matter of a constitutional grain is manipulated by gremlins. We all seem curved. I turn infrared and find my muscles have all gulped Guyana.

Window cook. Coffee laughing at a map. I succeed at roots although the doctrine of bristles eludes me. I have rattan to murmur and I expect to be culminated in pink. The prominence of steel sticks to my secret humor, which is sideways, and huckleberry.

I’m bewildered by mimes. I pull my goals into kerosene and light them on fire. I endure by including emotion. The life of a cat is an office grouse. I saw my intestines in anarchic ecstasy and decided on burlap by counting the ruts in a nearby road. The incentive to fly deepens my respect for dreaming.

The door steers are an ensemble. Wisdom circulates the pigment thunder.

I float in syntax. I’m freely vital, but also a little roller skate. Orange is never vague. But it’s baffling how the hairbrush is shoved across the head without stinging any sounds up there.

I explode into exhibition. Light hugs and a deep rub. Snow bump whistle burp.

I’m a lost chronological tonic of sparkly silt. The river moves over me I’m a catfish on the bottom of your attention. Unpredictable viscera whispering coalition. Heaven is an imponderable excursion through my leg. I’m all airplane. Wool’s unseemly seamlessness in seesaw scrutiny. Roots finding themselves tangled in the cemetery transformations. A robin listening for worms.

If I increase my perspectives I get ghostly indentations in my lotus. I rip myself into appointments. I stray a little from the topic which was never quite established to begin with and anchor near Marseille. The caboose always greets the places its leaving.

And this is awakened by feather. The pulleys creak as we draw the sky closer. I feel the energy of sharing. Tugged. Jingled by the guests. I can see infinity in the curve of a spoon. Time in the tines of a fork. Sand. Mass is such a rascal. The thumb hangs from the hand indispensable and fun. We deepen our resources by leaving our doors open. And Cezanne gives space a theatre.

Word Salad Slingshot Lacquer

Sentimental litmus dust. I think, therefore I’m excruciating. This must be hokey. Hobnailed obstetrics. Vascular outlet for an inscrutable rhythm. Mustard is more than a taste it’s also a transition to something disheveled. Palette on a road. Paregoric snivel dressed in a negligee. Tom-tom touchdown seasoned with iodine. I know a geology when I see one. It proceeds by Jell-O locomotive. Ok, I’m ointment. Now what?

Lissome refreshments produce a type of introversion known as oyster through the lips. Royalty in a can Yosemite mullet the rhetoric of a mineral. Tolerable tombstone I have plenty of meditation to give you please come closer and I will dissolve in your crucible of rules. Woolgathering is my favorite form of pragmatism. Trowel sentry modest as an oboe.

Here comes some gravity to help keep us massive. Matter is often drowned by too much werewolf. Socialize and return to your ivory vista. The horn is your guide. Grow patient and get a lake. Individuality is a crisp thin fungus. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to become a crackpot.

I’m sometimes intimate with a sentence that comes to me in the night and occupies the quiet mathematics of willow. The air is electric with death. Paper gives us the world it demands. We create one by scrounging. I’m spending a lot of time in the closet. Do I want a Being that is impartial and above it all, or a Being so immersed in Portugal that I can see Spain at the border of my junk? The world appears different when the traffic lights sing. We have a language that fixes brains with people’s groceries. Capitalism doesn’t love you. Would life be a simpler if it did? Imagine swimming through the God when you take to the air. For such is the power of art.