The Flowering Of Subjectivity

You could say poetry is impertinent, futile, vain and narcissistic, a little louche and outmoded, and it would be true, it would be legitimate and veridical, perhaps a little quizzical. But so what? Who didn’t know that at that beginning? Before it all turned into a dystopic, despotic empire of derelict strip malls and opioid addiction. The president is a clown and the vice president is a refrigerator. So then here comes some poetry, awkwardly handling things in the gift shop, inappropriately flirting, farting on the sly, furtively avoiding eye contact. Is someone cooking broccoli? Is there life on Mars? Will there be adequate water in the future? What is the first word to come into your mind when I say California? There are endless cups of coffee in fairyland. But few know the way. It’s principally a matter of smashing all the taboos and finding a good friend.

What’s to become of this world? The sun rises from behind the mountains. Our laptops converge on parsley. Our goulash, sagacious and hot, is a tub of intense semantic activity, a veritable slop of unabashed solipsism. I keep all my paraphernalia in my valise. I forgot the significance of the pig. I forget everything. The shape in the stone is calling to me. Its prophecies fold over me in waves. A violent wind blows over the water. I’m authorized to say what I want. I’ve got the history of Norway engraved on my belt. Consciousness rolls around in my head like a barrel of sodium. The universe tastes like energy, a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference ambles by on a pseudopodium. Go, go, go. Go pseudopodium.

Our poetry is deformed because the world is deformed. It begins with extreme winds and ends with a bonfire. Words are apparitions. I can’t explain their behavior. But I love the shape of propellers. I envision Karl Marx in the British Library, twirling a pencil and thinking in a vein alien to Hegel. Capitalist avarice is just a form of premature senility. Nothing I want ever adds up to a coherent picture of Memphis. It was the insistence on dialectical equilibrium in Hegel’s hermeneutic which has the most immediate and controversial impact on Sun Studio. We call this The Flowering of Subjectivity. It happened when Elvis met John Keats in a dream.

I like collecting clouds. I pull them out of the sky, fold them up and slide them onto closet hangers. Everything gets soaked when the clouds bust open and start to rain. I just pick the rain up and fold it and stick it in a drawer of rainbows. I’ve got a horse, a mannequin and a doughnut. I’ve got a Bluetooth radio, a bedroom lamp with a three-way bulb, and a compulsion to describe the ineffable. Let these words tickle your ears with thoughts of paradise. Everything here is a lie, of course, which makes it all completely true. The universe walks around in my head looking for a place to sit down. Is there a language that can describe this? I’m working on it.