Moon Sugar

Here comes a duodenum, running away from a colonoscopy. And here I am. Here we are. Together at last. Our little secrets burn into the table, terrible and strangely indigo. What can I say? Pain is a difficult business to put down on paper. It has a lot of dimensions. You need a philosophy. A lot of philosophy. A little luck. And a bottle of whiskey. Hedge clippers, Band-Aids, Spinoza. I blow my top when solicitors come to the door. Nobody respects your privacy. Though fewer and fewer seem to require privacy. People have been hollowed out. But who am I to make these judgements? Upon what foundation? Is it my own conception of what is fundamental and essential in modern life? That should be obvious: it’s waffles. Waffles every time.

I crave the power of calamity. The spin of the tornado, the fury of the hurricane, the rhetoric of the unconscious. Can you carry these words to the end of the sentence? Lift your voice and let it come out, all that feeling, like scruples on a string, like the pressure of water in a garden hose. It’s what you do when you have a mouth. You let it out. You let everything out. Thought can alter the world. But so can a monkey with a ducktail and a fake tan. Reality is under siege. What’s to become of this world? You can’t take a single thing for granted. Last night, as I was cleaning out my brain, I stumbled over a universe. I could use a sponge. It made quite a mess.

I like music that’s like a wild animal trying to get out of a cage. Will anything save us? Redeem us? Whatever control I have is illusory. When people forget how to be alone, society falls apart. A big mirror in Deadwood, South Dakota attests to the jocularity in a nook to the back, where the older men play poker and the younger men stare at their smartphones. It’s irritating to have to surrender to the needs of the body. There’ll be an end to that someday. Meanwhile, keep your eye out for Texas. Sunlight kisses our torment. The highway has the emotional value of a vial of nitroglycerin. It keeps the speedometer happy. The needle is stuck in infinity.

The tongue does what it wants. Whatever control I have is illusory. Try navigating in this world. Rain at the airport, a pretty comb in my back pocket. Frank O’Hara is piloting the plane. Delores O’Riordan stands in the dark holding a luminous rabbit. The lesson to be learned is simple: make sure your illusions are light. Fill them with helium. Fill them with sound. Fill them with music. You can trust music. Music is in a war with banality. Our laughter percolates the sadness evident in the ceiling, which is pressed tin, a relic from the past, the sheen of despair in moon sugar. It takes a billion molecules to make a polymer get up and sing like Etta James. A kind of glue holds it all together. Let’s call that glue music. The room is full of it. Even the light is sticky.