Backyard Aporia

Stars and stripes are Willy DeVille when he was bubbly. He quickly learned to resolve the clairvoyance of clothing. Do all explorations begin like this? The frozen light of blue diamond dawns brings cactus and ironweed to mind. Old mines. Deep wells. Jesus fasting in the desert forty days and forty nights to be tempted by the devil. Nobody goes to Des Moines to be tempted by the devil. The devil doesn’t live there. The devil lives in Chicago. Or used to. I don’t where he lives. Probably lives like one of those multibillionaires with yachts the size of Guam. But I have to ask: when was luck ever an option? My soliloquies are all worn and floppy, the laces all squiggly, and all that is fair and rational well out of reach. It’s another typical day on Earth. Petula Clark singing Downtown in a subway. Willy DeVille in the Dordogne. The last time I felt this literal I was swinging from vine to vine at the San Diego Zoo. This gave suppleness and meaning to my metaphors, which I squandered on the weather. Silly me. And I had a dog named Talk who never talked. If I rang a little bell he’d get up on his hind legs and strut around imitating Liechtenstein. I will rise now and go to Innisfree. If you think pink is fun you should try applying vowels to the soft vaginal folds of a lingual franca. The implications speak for themselves.

My salt is crammed with elegies to Euclid's eyelid. There are alluring subtleties almost impossible to convey with mathematical thoughts that languish in the hallway closet. I’m not sure interior angles are what’s needed now. I want straw, and leisure, and girl scout cookies. Does this make me a barn? The middle name of profit is garbage. And it smells like hell. We are the arbiters of yellow. What we say and do is yellow. But what we think is often blue. I can’t account for that. The best way to protect a new meaning is to spend an entire afternoon doing nothing but gazing at the words lush, leafy, and by appointment only. Step two is to believe the spoon to be more sublime than napkins. Pull a rapier from its sheath. And slash a big fat Z into the back of a rococo armchair. Do it for the sake of rockabilly antimatter. For liberty and justice and dreams of swashbuckling gallantry. Like that day in Paris, July, 1789, when I first met retribution, and squirrelly urges and nostrils dilating with the scent of revolt, and how it might be used to express a library of fugitive sensations and the spirit of a golden improbability.

We find doors in graves. Places of allegory. And rock.

Without a third eye, everything in existence looks like a bathtub. Ideally, I’d like to do without a house or a car. But wouldn't it be more accurate to say what drugs to take, what shamans to look for? The vanishing point perspective is free to talk to people. About anything. Dogwood seeds in a city park. The whole point of poetry. Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. That’s it. That’s what I need. New insects. New vegetables. Whole new madrigals of deliciously wet pennies when a woman smiles. The ghost of her Cretaceous leaves rustling in the parlor of Emily Dickinson. Wild Bill Hickok creasing fillets of time into asymmetries of willow. It’s not really a question of linguistic grooves. It’s more like things stacked, one by one, on a plank of pine. This is how it is on Planet Earth in the 21^st century. The likelihood of abduction by aliens from space always leaves us with a trace of the burlesque. The butt of a joke suddenly awakens the Norse gods, and the water moves catlike to the shore, teeming with designation. I’ve seen consciousness squirm in the mind of a black mamba. But that’s just tomfoolery. Consciousness may be found at the edge of a river, or wild in a backyard aporia. One thing to look for: archetypes. And secondly, carbon dioxide. May the sky be merciful tonight. And float in space. With us on it. And all these words, which I planted here, to warm them into life, and meaning.