The Séance Of Speech

I lift the insults and carry them to the fire. I feel the heat thickening around me. That glorious moment where, on the edge of the world, the mute existence of mud and pine complement the séance of speech. A creature of black signs on a sheet of white paper trembles in the light of our mutiny. Can you put something hot in it? Something life-giving and generous? A little focus, a little concentration. I find your demeanor a little rattan. A bit rickety. Maybe you could use a mimosa. The sun is just now spilling its gold in the water as it sinks below the horizon. I gave a bohemian finger to this painting, and swirled it around. Later, in our room, we'll sit beside the pipes as they hiss and steam and authorize a start to our conversation. The whole point of a conversation is a good laugh. This includes the ongoing dialogue in my head. Which is a different kind of circus. All the lions are ions. And all my regrets ride merry-go-rounds. 

Each word floats in amniotic peace as retinal nerves flash its opacity to the brain. The piano produces a rondo for this shape. It has a tremolo, and seems a little unsteady. Remember: the metamorphosis was a bas-relief before it walked the earth. I retired from the physiology of a robin. I had to. It was early summer, and I felt more like Iggy Pop than Igor Stravinsky. An incident is what happens before a propeller creates a wake. It’s the kind of song that makes you get a little goofy. A flickering line dances where a little gravity lingers. We may witness a paradigm shift before the next generation arrives. It may improbably happen with this call to the delegates. Our effervescence is sown in concentration. In a noisy kitchen in Nice. The bouillabaisse of the mind, the quiet simmer of contemplation. I include the meridional with the velvet and put an easel by the waterfall. I like this mahogany, it’s free of anything specific.

I never thought life would be like this in old age. Mythical, weird, apocalyptic. Roman. As during the reign of Caligula. I’d envisioned more Emerson, more Whitman, more Thoreau. What was I thinking? Had I never read Camus? Had I never read Schopenhauer? I was lost in the forests of rumination where flowers of beautiful rhetoric are as diverse as cemeteries and authentic as genitalia. I try to keep my anomalies intact to protect myself from all the incongruities within anonymous Being. Then along came Larry David who inspired me to write an angry book about people who park their cars with a defiant and breathtaking insouciance. It suited a world in which inundations of spermatic ink could no longer support the hideous truth lying on top of me like a succubus. I was unnerved by the clatter of adjectives, the uncanny poise of the evergreens amid the Lynchian fury of Snoqualmie Falls. Speech is the common vapor emanating from the warmth of our blood. Attempts to block its passage result in delirium, fever, and gangrene. The myth of world which creates us and which we create is an unceasing runaway train. And stirrings of the secret life beneath the skin exhilarate to the lift of an airplane.