The Abiogenesis Of Things

I need a knife to cut a loaf of bread and a key to open an old caress. I need a match to light a candle and a hammock in Polynesia to sift a cindery rumination. I need a book to open my mind and a broken heart to cast shadows in the street. A similar slow eye and a Dutch painting to walk out of a woman’s pearl. A reason for being and a reason for not being. A window, a door, and some extraordinary plumage. An excellent soft bed. A plate of steaming algebra. A bucket of sounds encountered by the shore. I have a chest of drawers for things such as this and Friday wheels and Tuesday glass and the soul of a knitter in the guise of a surgeon. I operate tomorrow on a lark of bitter alphabets. I do have a set of preferences when it comes to fabric softeners, though I remain neutral on the subject of chasms. I favor the leap of the chameleon to the monotony of refrigerators humming in chorus during the birth of ice. There are things that happen so easily that it takes years to understand them. Sooner or later you find yourself at the edge of a diving board preparing to jump into the void. And life feels raw. And life feels real.

Life, as we know it, requires cellular structure, metabolism, and a Barcalounger. A chemically unstable environment ignites its predicates. Gets it going, as it were. Walking. Strolling. Collecting things. Smelling things. Selling things. Malleable forms and good solid friends furnish our world with forks and jelly. Invention is three-fifths cough syrup and two-fifths quirk. The first time I saw a lazy Susan was at an IHOP. And the first time I journeyed through Proust I felt soulful and difficult. No one thought of saving a dream with a mass of words until the dream became reality and reality became a sweaty Monday in a friend’s attic with a typewriter and a bottle of Scotch. Did you know that there are fish in the insanely fathomless depths of the ocean that glow like a Venetian lantern? A broken hammer is still a hammer. Context and function are eccentric pods of mystical absorption. And this is where life truly begins, in the depths by hydrothermal vents & random associations.

An organism is a storm of fire, a point of novelty experiencing itself as a rose, an amoeba, or a Granny Smith. As a body of prose attempting to animate a creature with four legs and fur, or build a city of gowns and toothpicks. As a kiss. As a crawl. As a greeting on a stairway. As a poem of deep patterns recapitulating waffles and claws. If the bare bones of existence distress the mind, the planet soothes it with poplars and birds. Life is something larger than what is contained in the body. The energy that drives it is a shaggy diffusion of immeasurable vogue. There is a time for needles and a time for opinions. Now is the time for timpani. Kettledrums and vermicelli. Little linguistic tricks that work like polymers to expand the outward drift of things, the abilities of limbs and the blithe transactions of tentacles. Nerves. Veins. Sensory membranes. The procreational giddiness that causes the living to embrace the perversions of art. Strip utility of its power. Dress in the negligees of leisure. Bring a fabulous benevolence to the daily warehouse, and sit down and have your lunch on a picnic table, near an oak, or by a river.