Facts The Heart Can Feel

There was a suicide in the park this morning. I was sitting at my desk reading an article online when R returned suddenly from her morning walk in tears. My immediate thought was that the park department had chopped down the rhododendrons we’d been watering, lugging gallon jugs of water up the switchback trail in 90-degree August heat and letting it pour slowly into the stubborn, hydrophobic dirt. The region had been suffering drought conditions for several years, as well as shrouds of wildfire smoke from Canada to the north and the Cascades to the east. The park department refused to water the rhodies because the sprinkler system had been dismantled and removed. But that wasn’t it. She said there’d been a suicide on the upper tier of the park. The police stopped her as she was going up the trail. Had she not paused to redo the laces in her shoes she may have seen the body, if not the actual moment the man had taken out a gun and shot himself in the head.

A neighbor had seen the man. He’d been sitting on a bench on a viewpoint in the park overlooking the city and mountains and the boats and ships on Lake Union. He’d been sitting there a long time. His car was parked nearby. The neighbor hadn’t seen the man shoot himself, but she’d heard the gunshot. A number of houses cluster around the upper tier of the park. I wonder if anyone else had seen it. It must’ve happened quickly.

The man had driven to that spot. He knew what he was doing. What he was about to do. To be or not to be. He’d chosen the latter. And to do it in this particular spot. With sky as intermediary.  

Funny thing is I’d just quoted Albert Camus in a letter to a friend. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.”

Later in the afternoon, after a dental appointment, I walked home. I decided to go through the park, mostly out of curiosity, a rather creepy rubbernecking darkened with a tinge of dread. There were things I didn’t want to see. But felt compelled, nevertheless, to walk through the park. Suicide is no longer considered a crime in most states. But it felt like a crime scene.

I saw nothing. The park was pristine, green and brown in the golden light of the sun. No blood. No bullet. The man was gone from this place, so utterly gone it was hard to conceive of years of struggle and pain, of whatever it was that led that man to this place, and to leave it so abruptly, following what must be assumed had been a lingering meditative moment on a bench in the morning sun. A pleasure weighed, perhaps, with the darker purpose the man harbored of coming there to do what he had chosen to do. To not to be. That was his answer. And he had acted on it with sureness and resolve. With forethought. With purpose. And no one else around. 

 

Man On The Runway

Pulse my spoon if the tumble outward is my reality. I’m watching our plugs writhe. Stink wear along the ingredients. I wander a timeless Baudelaire. I’m the formula for a stepladder I ski.

If a noun can make a flavor shout contact I would advise it. The embellished explanation must flourish in obscurity if it is to make a difference in sagging. I feel like groping the python. A cuticle is a cap of rain. I feel it in all the things I do. This constant fastening. This meditation.

It’s pretty to wallow and build my respect. Arms wear images if there’s a tattoo parlor nearby. Snap some begging amid the purple alerts. We make decorations so loud it makes the brocade sweat. I drill my wallet with a picture of money. There are ports considered by chin that I would gladly support, even if it takes all summer. Wet cement when I’m feeling busy with being alive.

Swerve out I say and bend to the light of my bulbs. Prowl a seashore. The emphasis should be on grandeur. A muse in the Louvre holds your Pythagorean window. You can learn things from fencing. Amalgamation is where the appeal begins to rattle.  The muscle of the heart makes this moccasin seem included. Therefore, I climb the staircase meditating on a dream I support.

A chisel believes the steel. Seashore cubes we crowd with assertion to make flower our clasp. I get it. Arrange a gross confession thickened with trickle. Lean in close. Let your nostrils take in the smell of creosote. I mean the concertina a willingness to play it but lack the skill to pull it off. What’s important is intent. We begin the migration while we pummel our talk with caviar.

My coffee is a limousine for the mind. We get tattooed in the rain. Me and my cup of coffee. There’s a twist in the story by which one can seduce the estuary and make it a swamp. Enkindle crystal. It makes the thermometer lower in expectation. But rise in urgency. A diagnosis of life is something I can live with. I see this sweeten a vertical ejection with surprising combustibility.

Pound a luminous edge if the dirt lingers. If I exhort overmuch, I will sift the dregs of my tea for a gentler mode of expression, and a glimpse of the future. Here emerges an angel of hinges. This is why the door creaks. There’s a spirit inside. As rails to the earth ambiguity rolls forward with purposeless purposefulness. Swimming among sharks isn’t a challenge it’s just plain stupid.

The hibachi urges heat. Mimicry urges death. The dissolution of the ego in a pudding of imitation leather. Hectic abandon we clench with our teeth. The assembled robin is a good robin albeit constrained by its surface to remain an emblem for the triumph of woodbine. I shall withdraw now and attend to my books. The aftereffects are as broad as the willingness to sparkle, or the readiness to endure the implications of this. I’m fine on the sidewalk, impersonal as a gym instructor. But out here I’m frantic, and orange. A man on the runway, waving semaphores. 

 

The Page Turner

Her hands are swift and supple as swallows, bouncing off the keyboard in rapid-fire constellations of notes, because she's playing Bach's Concerto no.1 in D Minor, which is busy and prodigal and all over the place. She is Polina Olegovna Osetinskaya, a beautiful Russian pianist. She’s wearing a black gown with extravagant flounces and a long-sleeved top. Her features are exquisite. Seated next to her is a young woman, also dressed in black, who is there to turn the pages of the printed music, a task she performs so smoothly, and with such humble precision, that her presence has the solemnity of thought, a highly focused thought, a concentration of thought, like an abstract of focus in its purest form. The two faces are so different. The pianist’s face is luminous, like porcelain, whereas the page turner’s face is warm and full, like the air in a bakery on a winter morning. When she rises to turn the page, bringing into detail the black lace of her blouse, she turns the page with calm dexterity, & sits back down. How odd that must feel. Or maybe not. It’s hard to guess what people are feeling. The music is self-evident. It’s a torrent of notes, a mania, a zeal. The page turner is poised. Outwardly calm. I’d be terrified. Imagine getting up and you can’t get your finger on the paper, and it falls into the lap of Polina Olegonva Osetinskaya, and Bach’s composition is suddenly frozen, silent as ice. The embarrassment. The loss of a career. How does she do it? Manage that calm. It’s masterful. It amazes me how well some people adapt, evolve, nestle into roles of acute stress, and negotiate those critical moments in life, a rock climber’s fingers seeking a tiny, barely perceptible fissure, or a young woman rising to turn a page. On a stage. With a full auditorium. In a long black dress. Long silken hair flowing over her shoulders. I’m nervous for her. Which is silly. The concert is over. Everyone has gone home. The stage crew, the conductor, and the janitor have all gone home. The page turner is home in her home. I’m home in my home. Reading. Turning a page.

The Palette Of A Palate Is A Palaver

Time now to trudge our way to calm. We shall enhance our gardenia afterwards with an equator. Time is out loud both a grandeur and a serenade. Syntax handles whispers to precipitate a source. Independence is a cloud of mustard. We mind the attic above while wading in its insects.

Discuss a cram by wildcat. The fox is a wound in the hammer, a hanging cartilage we force to exist by building it. The feeling of the gym has an accordion calculus that a few struts give me contact. Wedge an innocence into my groin. My groan is to your merit. The hope we imitate is our palette. Think of it as an allegory entangled in the neurons of a bee sting. It’ll feel corollary.

Vertebrae. This reality is a burden. It’s our hammerhead by flipping a voice. One must treat images like birth. Plant willingness behind it to expand. Cog a need over a toss into turpentine. Here come the virgins. They paint a pretty treasure for the canvas and sell it for a song. 

Mine is an easy scenario. I expect little from hair except space. I spur a dusty anticipation. My threatening does this. It makes subtlety taste like exposition. It explodes into ghosts, which resemble words trying to hug a sensitive propulsion. My impulsions have led to not a few personal discoveries. I was told I was too miscellaneous. I can’t deny it. I really like fanfare.

Tendency has a name out there in the wild and this goldfish knows it. What friction combines Euclid with my oblong might also be an odor. I scrounged for an answer that wouldn’t clash with the rails. It’s a mood we clasp with what unfolds. What else is there? Nudity upset our migration. It continued to fester until I began wearing Baudelaire's play. If you’d like to hear the tale of our wallow follow me to the squashed prohibition where we yanked my moo into a throbbing goo.

A canoe falls in its shadow and awakes the forest mushrooms. A palette fretted to death has implications for the colors of autumn. Begin above the oasis which is piquant with my delight. The version we have chosen over all the others coyly embellishes our taproot. Our focus is there, asleep in the morning. It’s a funny habitat, not the kind of place you’d expect to find a sneaker floating in words. I shall sow the mud with azaleas and find some proper lighting for the oysters.

I’m trying. I really am. Trying to find a formula by which I may recreate the world in the image of a cockatoo. My consciousness would like that. Or at least I think it would. I never can tell. I can be quite resourceful when it comes to dangling candy in front of my mouth. When it’s raining in my mind the wash is ablaze with fatalism. There are just some things one should never take too seriously. Percolation, for example. Or the crackle of bacon. Taste itself, which is our first explanation for memory, and which extends the spirit past the scudding clouds, in blossoming moonlight, with angels on the radio and sagebrush in the beams of our headlights. 

 

Voyage To Land Of The Dots

Experiments select what they graze on, which is the problem. A thermometer a grandeur and a museum. The coaxial split has style. Encouragement to illuminate the wall more and more. The copper plate makes the bird drift through the air.

I’m juggling with the timelessness that accelerates inside an oak. There was a stilling cap of wind I wore that made life feel prismatic, like a sky. You can curve a song by singing what it wants to do. The elevator boils next. I see a seam that we make and ride it into our structure.

Thermometers need architecture. They just do. It seems to me that the hypothesis has some whiffs to it, but could use a little more allegory. I sigh, flap around the room, and land on an armchair, irritated that such monstrosities as this must seek expression in writing. We bounce down the street singing operas. My intestines growl. I soothe them with a little milk of magnesia, and am glad. I live among potatoes and elephants. The comfort of hallucinations is a resource.

Monumental hive we vein with power. My plow jokes of carrots before it caresses the soil. Our summoning abounds in flavor but brings no plucking to our epilogue. There is a pathos in bread I do not find in crackers. I spot your cocoon interior. I could hear it leak from the Charles Bridge.

Our evocation got serious when the escalator fired up again. Communion is a gush embellished by running. I dab the mushroom in confusion. The galaxy next to the scribbles is a flower. This should be flashing. I didn't say it had to be a tomato. Or convincing. It’s respectable to compose a simulacrum whose odor can weigh as much as a clarinet. Anything less is simply an outline.

Anybody can be a pogonophile. But it takes a mustache to be a skinflint. The plumbing of it all rattles the muscles of a lightbulb and leaves us moaning like a lampshade. I find a friction between insinuation and mutton. Even so it makes me happy to take you down to the river to see these things for yourself, the bathing women, the euphoria, the outcasts in their fine regalia. Morality is obsolete. We all go a little crazy at times. It’s the pogonophiles who suffer.

An author greets me at the entrance to the Land of Dots. We enter trough a colon: a transparent 3-sided object separating colors into theories and underworld Monstera Deliciosa dances its distillates all over our faces. Every two minutes a new religion emerges from the rear of the sentence and produces a goddess of tinfoil and vapor. The very ground trembles with Panpsychism, especially as it appears in the panels of the Sunday comics, a forklift running amok in a warehouse of Ben Day Dots and circus supplies. We exit into the blinding light of a fresh new job loading semicolons onto the back of a pickup, and a lively Bohemian polka.