Everything You Need To Know In Life

Should a poem be hard or soft? Can there be a softness so soft it’s hard? Can there be a hardness so hard it’s soft? What silly questions. I must be going soft. It’s hard to go soft. It takes a lot of hardness to let yourself be soft. Being is soft. And hard. Hard to be. Hard to be soft. Nobody sleeps on granite. Except the sky. The sky takes its clouds off and lies down on the mountain and that’s called night. The sky gets up and puts a soft cloud to its face and that’s dawn. You know what I mean. Everything you need to know in life is in the small of a woman’s back. I like the way curves insinuate what they’re doing, which is sly, and gracile, and flourishes in subtlety. The appetite is sharp. The mind is hungry. But not for knowledge. The mind wants chicken fingers. Songs and fluidity. The mind flirts with the universe and the universe flirts back. Marriage soon follows and books and nuclear fusion. This is why people sit in their parked cars gazing at the lights of Los Angeles, or the glitter of the Mediterranean, or nothing at all. “Let’s go surfing now, everyone’s learning how, come on a safari with me.” What is going on in your head this minute? Never mind. As soon as Julius Caesar passes, someone shoot him with a rubber band. Empires suck. And no. I don’t have a utopia. I’m fresh out. I thought I saw one go by a minute ago but it was just a float from a Macy’s parade lost in time and space. This much we know: feelings have shapes. But then why would the ghost of a cow appear to us as a steak? Death is nothing but sugar skulls. Despair is more circular, more like a tiger with a snake between her teeth. Faith comes to us dressed as a Gregorian chant. It’s ok. It looks fine. Just put the fucking turkey in the oven. Let your mind wander a little. Imagine the life of Lesley Gore. You don’t own me. Nobody owns me. I don’t own me. I don’t even have a warranty. What I do have is an embroidered shoe, a lobed Delft dish with a swan, and Constance Hopkin’s beaver hat. Meanwhile, The Band sings “The Shape I’m In,” which gives me speed bumps. I tell you. It’s been quite a trip. When did it begin? I try to find an answer in Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World. Until I wrote this, it did not exist, and so by writing it into existence, have I brought myself closer, a little nearer to the centrality of the situation? I don’t remember much of my arrival. I was probably wet, and crying, and very confused. And here I am many years later still crying, still confused. But writing. Bringing things into existence. Is that a cala lily at the end of this sentence? The indefinability of Being wiggles a finger in the slippery core of the universe. And the universe gets excited and expands into a first lieutenant standing on a hill. Watching the sun set on the Potomac. Which is my current understanding of water. I’ve pinned a little here, in the form of spittle. Don’t worry. It’s already evaporated & floating over an amusement park. What I mean to say is that I’m led to feel what I feel and I feel what I feel when I’m led to feel what I feel. But what leads me to say these things? Skeeter Davis? The Songs That Shaped 1963. Dinosaurs and surgeons and conjecture. My life has been an odyssey of fugues and curious latitudes. Irritations spur streams of consciousness but not as much as you think. Sometimes they just make me want to watch sunlight pass through a glass full of Chablis. Nothing is ever so near to us as a diving board. Here I go, leaping into space. Destiny is for swans. Space is for larks.