A Crisis

A crisis is destroying the old patterns. Longitude and latitude are obsolete. The lattices are no longer arranged in Euclidean space. I’m not entirely about reform, but I don’t want to get too reckless. I don’t want any haar in my hair. Or flotsam. Keith Richards enters in an elegant frock coat. What’s he doing here? Where’s his guitar? Where’s your guitar, dude? Jesus, it’s happening all over again. Hear that? They’re bringing up the chains. Watch your step. This part of the dock is a bit rickety. The fire is out but the smell of soot persists. That smoke is caused by an excess of subjectivity. Don’t get too bogged down in details. Almost every sentence reads like a novel. Can you please hand me that mirror? You can find your fate in the dregs at the bottom of the cup. The heavy pounding of drums mean that a baby is being delivered. Otherwise, nothing much has changed. Seagulls, as always, circle the landfill. Look out now, I’m going to send this football spiraling. Check me when I get back. I need to see if my nose is still attached.

Because here is what is at stake: managing to find the words to reflect reality and to tell the truth without getting completely bogged down in it. Whether in writing, in philosophical practice or on the couch, what is seeing clearly, if not succeeding in giving form to what could not be articulated, in formulating the unnamable?

I hear the man upstairs chopping. He’s a chopper. This is a chapter of chopping. This is chopped. This is not. This is a not a knife. Now this, this is a knife: feel its edge sever the air.

Sometimes you need to tell the poem to get going, get out there and do something, save the world, inspire people, jail the billionaires, wobble some jelly, get drunk and sing like Bjork, or a cat, embalm time in a hymn to eternity, sprinkle commas on a distressed fly, let it pause, then fly away with a white goatee of aggression. Be the high green cheese of the century. Shoot lightning from the ass of desire. Be the bones of an eccentric book with an eccentric spine. Give Saturday a kick in the pants. Build a fire with the vertebrae of ancient tornadoes. But please. Get going.

I love nature because it’s careless with pomegranate and rolls around in the grass and spreads itself everywhere and for a brief time walked around in the skin of humans feeling the air and smelling the strain of the delirious and unhinged. Yes, we’re in the midst of a crisis. A crisis of understanding. A crisis of value. A crisis of biodiversity, of diversion, the backwash of honest laughter and sunsets at the Café Canvas. And this will turn out to be us in conversation. We were here for a brief time. Metaphors hung like Finland from the reality of one’s skin. There were images in the street for our songs. And one time I took hold of a big fat sentence and pulled it out of my mouth. That’s it, I said. I’m done. Can one be well in a dying world? Don’t know. But you you can love it all with eyes and bones until it’s all just a tibia in the leg of a crippled universe.