It Can Kill A Man

It can kill a man. Said Wallace Stevens. That’s what misery does. Ergo, you should buy some insurance. This is how poets make a living. And it’s not too miserable. I’m available on most days of the week, except Saturday and Sunday, which are relegated to sleeping, and leisure, and gratifying my appetites. On Monday I am like a man in the body of a violent beast. I keep a thesaurus in the bottom drawer of my desk in case I need to describe something elegant and queenly, a balloon rising to the ceiling of somebody’s wedding, Elizabeth Taylor on one side, Richard Burton on the other. This is their planet, their world, now in ascendancy, and rich and limitless, but also a little taut with risk, like a bank robbery, or a Mardi Gras float moving in the direction of things as yet unknown. This is the skin of the poem. The bones are angular, and shaped toward their function, which is ejaculatory. You know. Like opening a book, and finding a wad of cash. The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

As an adult, you learn to avoid certain things. Invisible things. Subtleties. Like the embarrassed side glance in a crowded room when you tell someone you’re a poet. You have a badge. And enough poetic license to start a family. But nobody takes you seriously. Don’t worry. It’s all just a matter of orientation, disorientation, and blunt polytrauma. Each minute something new scurries across the ocean floor. Just holding a guitar is cool. There are surges, occasionally, of windows. Popcorn is a mood waiting to come to life. When there are waves, you learn to swim, and when there are swans you let the boat drift. It’s as simple as that. The oars are all yours.

There is no stasis in this business. Nothing to pin down. It’s not like that speck on the screen you wipe off with a soft cloth that turns out to be a period, or more accurately, a fistful of pixels clenched in a dot, otherwise known as a period, which stops sentences from growing into a lot of weeping blubber, bookmakers subject to changing moods, sacrifices, slumps, illiteracy, the full panorama of someone’s life unfolding, catching fire, and attracting UFOS. Though I think you can make a case for it. Statutes related to the metaphysics of calico, criminal code, criminal procedure, real property and conveyances, luxuries, like reading, having the time to read, and the lips of a distant cobweb. Here in Washington State there are laws against harassing bigfoot, sleeping in someone’s outhouse, pretending your parents are wealthy, whaling on Sunday or buying a mattress, lick lollipops in cars, use X-rays for shoe fittings, disguises for teachers, abandon a refrigerator, and (if you live in Everett) display a hypnotized person in a store window. How many laws have you broken? I’m not going to say, for fear it may implicate me in the bismuth of a jellyfish. I’m boiling up something this minute, in fact. Definitions. Secrets. Collisions. Big gray blocks stepping on absence. And a huge spatula. Straight from eye to paper.

I begin to feel ultramarine when I travel. And geographical. Spreading out on a bed honors the muscles. The best way to travel is to scatter abroad above the earth's atmosphere, that place where the sky ends and prophecy begins. It’s a trip, baby. There are trillions and trillions of stars and nebulae and a sigh bursting out of a pack of allegories. Birthdays counted in light years. I’m not appreciably different at 79 then I was at 18. I like those movies where a troubled boxer takes his ire out on a punchbag. The strange elegance of a boxer suspended in a photograph. Contrasting things makes them tremble. The potato has an immediacy only a Bach could appreciate in a potato concerto, fingers prowling the keys for a look at the sublime, and finding sea salt and rosemary. There’s always the element of surprise. Counterpoint and fugue. Mood dynamics and tempo. Tornados and strange loops. If the potatoes are going into the oven, so should the bacon. You don’t want stand there by the sink looking like Lady Macbeth. Think of something like wage satisfaction.  The mysteries of the Dirac equation. As soon as I found myself dogpaddling in a paragraph, I looked down to see the bottom, and discovered objects I didn’t understand. I would have to dive deeper. Buy a shovel. Buy some land. And plant some potatoes.

I didn’t discover how important it is to have a purpose until I didn’t have any. And yet something is there to push me, get me to roll out of bed, brush my teeth, brush my hair, feed the cat and sit down at a desk with a book. I think of Matthew McConaughey. That speech he has in True Detective. “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect separated from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion that having a self. This secretion of sensory, experience, and feeling. Programmed, with total assurance, that we’re each somebody. When, in fact, everybody’s nobody.” A normal person would so this as a slur of words with a pompous attitude toward the miracle of masturbation. I became difficult to categorize. Was I a mammal, or a crustacean? The antennae on the top of my head confuses people. Why is it always in motion, people ask. The vibrations of other stars produce eerie songs that I like to convert to words. There’s an eschatological dimension to it that I find difficult to put into palatable and wholesome dishes. This is why I was once so attracted to bars. The quieter the better.