A Bouquet Of Dumbbells

By the end of the concert everyone’s hair is a mess. I owe my existence here to the prodigality of pins. Things I stick to the wall. Things I think in bed at night. Things that wrinkle when immersed in thought, and turn into horses. It’s a luxury related to the theory I'm working on, which is conciliatory, and cake. It's also about writing. Isn't that what I'm doing? Words exist through the life-giving force of your eyes, which are hereby summoned by my franchise to appear in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Therefore, I’m going to exonerate you of intrigue. We know there is a higher reality, and yet we immerse ourselves in this one to gain nothing but Substack. At dawn, I see wrinkles in the sandstone and wonder if there are intuitions for this kind of perception. For writing to be possible, one must develop a technique that can be used like a fairground to attract a smorgasbord of obliging anomalies, or translate congruity like a cabbage, and deliver a baby. Can you hear the heat in your teeth? Imagine setting things on fire with your saliva. These are the reveries that meet through woodbine, sometimes attracting an electric current, which explains pasta. At least, from my point of view, we allow it to happen. So I ate it.

It’s what people do when the world has lost its footing. Let it hand itself over to that radiant energy we call a tomato. Feel free to the examine the eyeball of an ancient Druid. Use whatever pronouns you feel most appropriately express your angst. Identities are household articles, bubbles of glistening abstraction. We unbutton them because they are us. We are us because we wash and iron them, and fold and put them in drawers. Exhilaration spins rapidly in a conundrum of skates.  It’s just another way of letting a language dangle from the earlobes, fulfilling the ambitions of an investment nexus called Pie in the Sky Asset Hounds. The density of prose is linked to coconut in ways that go beyond what one might think. I sculpt it. Then bottle it in weather. It’s just something I do in the privacy of my burrow. I draw sunlight from problems, and pacify my hygiene. One must comb one's hair more than once, assuming it's like sugar, and that what has been said when science turns against its own beauty, is probably seaweed.

I like the literal effects of what a fuel line can do toward starting my shoes. Little things, like ignition coils and surgery. The insoluble helps me recognize my objective, which is twinkly, and bristles with fricatives. A lot of people ask what I do for a living and I scoop an answer out of the void and say live. I live for a living. But I’m retired now. I binge on IHOP, erotic fantasies appropriate to my senility, consort with the dead, and follow whatever trends appeal to my sense of spontaneity. I am what I decided to be ever since I exploded into a thousand pieces of Holocene postcard art. But suddenly, as if from somewhere dank, someone appeared and then disappeared behind a wall of rhetoric, and I thought about those days in the machine shop, juggling dimensions in the spiritual realm. It is through this form of strategic materialization we demonstrate our resilience. The night was a kind of Lucha Libre. The darkness embraced me so tightly it hurt. A woman popped out of me in tiny prisms of thought, causing penmanship and subjectivity. A magnificent laughter, dark as sapphire and twice as denim, ejected from a dream, and I remembered what it felt like to go cycling in Yucatan, searching for cenotes, and duende. 

There by the window, erect and rhombohedral, a spirit from another dimension holds a bouquet of dumbbells. This an argument for poetry as I surge forth to cook it. This is as good a place as any to stretch our chemistry into insubordination. The juiciest allegory I have ever seen poured from a deep conviction is now a clumsy private eye adrift in a universe of lampshades. None of us meant for this to happen, but happen it did, as most things happen, flailing around for angular abstractions, things we can use to grow bivalves beneath our words, and resurrect the death of the author from a long slumber in the burgundy postulates of a postmodernist aesthetic. None of this, incidentally, is based on what I know of calculus, which is less than a little, it’s a graveyard of privilege, a giant crushed tomato obstructing the passage as soon as I arrived. After dipping my finger into the iron prose of a Romanian novel, my arms went limp when the varnish of the nipple adorning the cover cracked open, releasing a million pearls. And that’s when I discovered a new aesthetic based on balustrades, a nuclear music proclaiming the tacit symmetry of waffles.