Furthermore

This cosmos, where storms and stars deliver sausage to the mailbox, is precisely what I call a tattoo. Furthermore, after negotiating with myself some time for shaving, I promised myself a hip-shaking game, the one I had to finish on Tuesday. It’s a busy life, when you allow it to reflect 36 square miles of ladybug jokes. Sometimes a larynx obtains enough freedom to brood. It marks the beginning of a profound potato, something I like to call a contingency. It’s remarkable how everything sparkles in the middle of a sentence, the darling of a long and strenuous spiritual progress. Every voyage begins with an acrobatic lucidity. Thoughts spring into wildebeests. Enough scullery mayhem to generate an entire Louvre of wanton tiara.

Our airplane is clean and has a neck as long and fat as Florida. I can go a long way without the usual legerdemain performed on a tissue of signs, but sooner or later I’ll need a hat and a pair of needle-nose pliers. It’s a rare pleasure these days to regard things openly, and without an abominable vocabulary. And yes, I do have opinions about things. The stars, the brain, the meaning of us, the howling caverns of Earth. Everything, except gauze, which has its own commerce, and reputation. You can see right through it. The seamlessness of inside and outside is witness to an exchange of fluids. Osmosis by alphabet. The stadium is helping me to get over it. This constant ooze. Language everywhere, stabbing at the air until it bleeds from an excess of meaning. Would you call this a form of music? I’d call it a place to go until an idea gets here. Everything I do, I do for you. I want you to be the first to see a propeller come out of my mouth and blow the world away.

There are poems in which the words blaze, burning industries down. We sometimes feel that way, we feel that way a lot, but my finery is what I want to convey, right here, right now, it's a gesture, something I want to give to you, something you can plug into the wall and call your own. Commerce is a bogus form of resplendence. But at least it’s something. Or used to be something. I think it’s called something different now. You have to be careful these days. Language can be used to disguise things. Nudity is the only deception we have left. It’s why meat seems harder to chew. Don’t matter. I’m automatically lurid. This morning, I heard a fugue eat its own confusion. I went on a technicolor journey through my head. And discovered Cuba.

People are so sensitive these days. You have to walk on tiptoe. It’s what we wanted, what we wanted all along. Tiny cavities to put our heart. Feel the pith of the universe pulse in the tongues of our shoes. Get hooked on anomalies. Architectural quirks. Piranesi. Origami DNA. The kind of nooks and crannies Emily Dickinson stuffed her poems. Language dribbles its peculiarities as our ruminations argue the necessity of bombast. I’m not sure what this will do. It’s pretty useless in a lot of ways to keep going, but we keep going, because there’s nowhere else to go, other than Reno. I consider this place a veritable hive of anxiety; all need for haberdashery has disappeared. Are you from Cincinnati? I thought so. I could tell by the creases in your forehead. Not to mention your hairline. It sounded like eyebrows bombing a crude warehouse facility. Nothing is harmed, of course, since it’s all protected by the socially maladjusted. The cat enters the room, looks at me, then exits. There's a certain worry in us that spouts a continuous slumgullion of usurped decorum. I find a sentence floating in the air and write it down. Audacity ensures the architecture of our obligations to one another will be soft as moss. And when the doors close, I feel the light ossify into a hot concerto of animated bones.

Wet legs scribble my fascination with lingerie. The trance is long and large. The waves are hypnotic. The ghosts are cinematic. At 78, the curtain descends. And then goes back up. The actors all come out and curtsy and bow. I see roses and lilies tossed on stage. The mind is a different kind of theater. It seizes a reason, and then realizes it’s Oedipus. Just folds of membrane in a suit of skin. We all want a good seat for the fall of the empire. And this is as good as any. A few others have commented on my ability to drag an annoying abyss behind me wherever I go. I use it to put things until the paragraph has time to develop its own glue and anchor an idea of form in your emotions. Let’s go down to the lake. I have something to show you. I can feel it squirming around in my pocket. Lightning dribbles from your lips. I think it’s time. Time now to carry the discourse west as I twist the weather around to make it less opinionated. And ornery.

It seems strange that I've gone my whole life without hitting anyone. I’ve been punched. Just never punched back. It struck me as deeply unnatural to do that. There was a big guy at a dance in North Dakota, 1966, wanted to go out and get it on. Fight me. I was stunned. I’m pretty sure he’d been provoked by my pants. They were splotched and dotted with paint. That’s how they were when I bought them. Some fashion designer must’ve seen the same merit as I did in walking around in an abstract painting, like Jackson Pollock, fresh from dripping another universe, another masterpiece of color and chaos. Fortunately, my buddy, a calm and reasonable man, who’d grown up on a farm in North Dakota, and knew how things worked there, explained to my scrapper that I was from Seattle, wasn’t familiar with the traditions here, meant no harm. To which I added, really, man, you’d be disappointed. One punch and I’m down. That can’t be satisfying. It’s not even a fight. He just looked at me. Perplexed. As I was. Note to self: provocation has consequences. And they’re not commonly understood. Something happens. Something alters. And the world appears different. One feels different to oneself, as if one had become a stranger to oneself, wearing stupid paint-splotched, Jackson Pollock pants to a dance and live band in a North Dakota barn, wondering if it might’ve been better just to go out and throw some punches. Get punched. Punch back. Here's one good reason: my opponent was at least 50 lbs. heavier. Reason two: broken nose. Reason three: broken ribs. Reason four: I need to be mad to hit someone. I wasn’t mad. Just confused. Reason five: there is no reason five. Reason six: see reason five. Reason seven: I’m not Mike Tyson. Or Jackson Pollock. But I am abstract. “Relating to or denoting art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but rather seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, colors, and textures to punch people.” Fashion as casus belli.

I came close to another fight in Maidstone, England, in May, 1972. My ex-wife and I had hitched a ride out of London and arrived in Maidstone by early evening. We asked a young man approximately my own age at the time (25) for information on a place we might spend the night – pitch a tent at a camping ground or stay at a cheap hotel – and very cheerfully took us under his wing. He was refined and genteel and had a way about him like Hugh Grant. He led us to a chippy – a fish and chip truck – and I had the best fish and chips I’ve ever had. Its memory still lingers in my mind, drenching my neurons with its moist textures and mild, chunky, slightly sweet flavor. We very much enjoyed this man’s company. I suggested buying him a beer at a local pub and he led us into a small restaurant with a few tables. There were three guys sitting at a table. To judge by the number of empty glasses sitting on the table they’d been there a while. They heard me talk and said something snide about my American accent. Their accents were not like the posh Received Pronunciation of our guide but a blend of cockney and estuary English. I wasn’t in disagreement, and I wasn’t inclined to defend my accent (American accents, with the notable exception of southern accents, are flat and dull compared to the lively lilt and music of English accents). I was searching for a self-deprecating remark when our guide deftly maneuvered us out of the place. He sensed trouble. What we left behind would remain in my mind as a scenario whose potential was precipitously aborted before it could develop into something more interesting and would remain forever unfulfilled. Merriment and song, or fists swinging and glasses breaking followed swiftly by a night in an English jail.

I was good at wrestling when I was a senior in high school, but that doesn’t count as fighting. Nevertheless, I fell that it is worthy of mention, as I do not want to come across as a complete pussy.

There have been a few men I’ve wanted to punch in the face, which would have been well-deserved on their part. I’m talking real slimy sons-of-bitches, narcissists arrogant as hell and sly and sneaky to boot, button-pushers, hoping you’ll take a swing and end up looking barbaric and stupid. I’m glad I didn’t take the bait. But man it would’ve felt good.

If I can manage to push my intentions into a better conceptual framework, I will celebrate by bringing on animal acts and clowns. I want to paint what it looks like when an attic dangles from a random memory. If a cypress appears, I will get behind the centaur. There is sometimes an eloquence in us that court stenographers find troubling. By passing through here, I find myself next to you. Experiments wear their eyes in whispers of ice and snow. Only then, can we move forward ringing bells with fervor and prodigality. One must sand the outdoors until a heavenly prologue squeezes evasions out of it. The last time this happened the edge of a long wide marsh disturbed the shoulder of the road. My anger was barely containable. But so charming were the bicycle’s peculiarities I played parlor talk on its spokes. The cacophony was incandescent and had a texture like a rag. The clouds pushed the sky around like a thing of infinite ambiguity. I found a sentence floating in the air. I think it's only fair to examine it and see if any small objects are floating around in its syllables. It’s never the same sentence. I take this to heart. Everything I do is calculated to meander, and when it does, I follow the swallows to the next invigoration.

Sometimes I like to sit and imagine I’m living in a painting by Johannes Vermeer. Everything is clear and auspicious and Dutch. The corner is rich with velvet. The milk is warm. I meditate on things. Objects of exploration and science. Maps. Sea monsters near the shores of the new world. Feeling alive is an ongoing project. It involves periods of self-examination. Reflection on the meaning of things. Various sports offer pleasant distractions from the serious business of life. Pool offers a surprising astronomy. My balls explore themselves. Diaphanous epiphanies illumine the room. Words appear on paper. My quill is a feathery enigma. The ink is a strange black semen, a semiotic stream of polymers sparkling at the edge of reality. The dice in my right shoulder create an éclair. I never direct my experiments. I just perch on a telephone wire and scratch it all silly. I love the sound of rain. Its grammar is always so variable, nimble as the hand of a painter creating subtle transitions from light to shadow, cool blues to warm umber.

Hanna Arendt arrives in a helicopter while I’m picking fruit. I get excited around altitude. My dummy gets up and mimics clocks from different dimensions. It looks like a strange Brazilian dance. The samba is beautifully executed. It does this by rubbing a sandstone sweater. Tap the word below its physiology to make it disappear. The fog will fill our barns until hunger secludes itself from the rigors of bohemia and finds a bag of grapes in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. I once rode a public elevator with hydraulic cylinders, a silverback gorilla reading À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, and Ringo Starr pedaling an exercise bike. I pressed the Bangkok button. The doors opened in Paris. I smiled. Got off. Waved bye to Ringo. Gave the gorilla a long good hug. And found a quiet place to read À la recherche de temps perdu.