Memorandum Of Understanding

It was high tide this afternoon when R and I went to visit our two favorite rocks by Puget Sound. I enjoy sitting there all the more when the rocks are surrounded by water, although it requires a bit more agility to clamber aboard. We were quick to notice two objects floating toward the shore, sometimes getting closer to attaining a restful position on the rocks and sand, sometimes getting drawn further away from the shore. One was clearly a small glass bottle; the other was harder to identify. We thought it might be a turtle. It turned out to be a bird. It was black with a white belly, a short neck and a beak with a little hook at the end. The wings were folded close to its body, forming a shroud, and the eyes were missing. Whatever death it met with was a mystery. The bottle drifted close enough to shore that I could fish it out easily. It was a Hornitos Tequila, a popular, mid-tier brand of 100% blue agave tequila produced in Jalisco, Mexico. No doubt, it was from one of the cruise ships moored a quarter mile distant at either Pier 91. The Port of Seattle opened Pier 66 (the Bell Street Pier) to cruise ships in 1996, and opened Pier 91 to cruise ships in 2009. My feelings concerning cruise ships is fundamentally negative. They’re grotesque sources of pollution, heavy air emissions of fuel oil containing massive amounts of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, vast liquid wastewater discharges, solid waste dumping and underwater noise. Washington State law prohibits bans all sewage releases and the Port of Seattle prohibits exhaust gas cleaning system (scrubber) wash water. In addition, the Port of Seattle has a “Memorandum of Understanding,” whatever the fuck that means, with the Washington State Department of Ecology in which large ships “agree” to prevent untreated or treated wastewater discharges into state waters. One very hot August a few years ago I waded into the water about knee deep and discovered a used tampon bobbing up and down. Water is such a forgiving element. It can lull me out of a rage or dislodge a black and ugly thought that’s been stuck in my brain for a number of hours, or days. And nothing is sweeter than a complete immersion in water, though in Puget Sound the temperature is around 54 to 61 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s cold. The dogs don’t seem to mind it, but it’s rare to see a human lolling about in it. Over the years, I’ve cultivated a memorandum of understanding with Puget Sound. It’s simple. Not much to it. I’m here. You’re here. Thank you for the rocks. The salmon. The birds. The jellyfish. The octopi. The oysters. The crabs. And especially the waves. The way they roll. The way they slop on the sand. And recede. And vanish in the light.

On Feeding Crows

Ten years of feeding crows has taught me a lot. It has confirmed the popular observation that crows are, indeed, highly intelligent. It has also revealed that crows can be phenomenally stupid. On balance, no single generality concerning their behavior will serve. One must resort to nuance and contradiction. The bird of paradise is a brightly colored rainforest bird with long, elaborate feathers and a bizarre courtship dance. It is not a single species, but an entire family containing roughly 42 to 45 distinct species. The crow is not among them. The crow is not a bird-of-paradise. The crow is a bird of paradox.

For example, one of their more maddening traits is to make life and communal living perplexing as a quantum algorithm using Hamiltonian simulation for solving wave equations in multidimensional space. If I toss a peanut to a single crow, it is not uncommon that as soon as the crow pounces on the peanut it gives a jubilant cry to its tribe, who then appear in a murder of twenty to thirty crows. The murder breaks up into a chaos of activity and high excitement. The crows speedily diverge to claim their trophy peanut, and fights break out almost immediately. The fights are serious, and weirdly primordial, like something out of the Cretaceous period. Crows aren’t inherently mean, but they do seem to have flash-point tempers. A popular tactic is to grab one of the opponent’s wings, give it a mighty tug and flip the combatant over on its back, upon which the antagonist pounces with bloodthirsty gusto. I have to break things up. It’s one of the reasons I ceased – or tried to cease – feeding crows. This behavior doesn’t break out all the time, but enough to make one question whether feeding crows is a prudent thing to do.

Which, of course, it is not.

That said, I wasn’t motivated by prudence to feed crows. It was something deeper. A need to connect with them. I had a crow when I was ten. I got it out of a nest with another infant crow, which I gave to my dad’s brother-in-law, who had a farm nearby. It was he and my dad that sent me up the ladder to get them. I had my doubts, but they were adults, grown men, so I deferred to their knowledge and wisdom; they must know what they were doing. My uncle-in-law’s crow grew to old age. He got to fly around a farm in what they called Gopher Gulch until a very mature age. Mine did not. I spent several months with her, spending nearly all day with her, including a trip from Minneapolis to Denver. She perched on the rim of a cardboard box on the backseat of my dad’s Buick. We let her fly around at rest stops. She slept with Pepper, the family dog, a black cocker spaniel with a sweet disposition. The crow would nestle so close to the dog that the two looked like one animal. They did most of their sleeping in my grandmother’s laundry room, who, I suspect, was less than pleased with the arrangement. Predictably, one morning the crow was gone. My father attempted an explanation. The crow was taken to a zoo. I was ten. I knew that was bullshit. But I didn’t want to know her true fate. I didn’t pursue the topic, and brooded on yet another aspect of the human adventure, a world-altering phenomenon ponderous with irrationality, violence, ingenuity, phantasmagoria and baffling contradictions.

I’m a runner. I began feeding crows on my runs. I’m astonished at how long I was able to keep that up. Eventually, I found myself spending more time feeding crows than running. My wife accompanied me most of the time. It was good to have some help. Nor was it long before the neighbors began to complain. We were a little taken aback by the hostility so many people directed toward crows. Keep in mind, we run in one of Seattle’s more affluent neighborhoods. The homes and landscaping are high end real estate. There are mansions. Most of the homes are priced between one to two million. When it comes to property, people are understandably anxious. One neighbor in particular, a man about my age, maybe younger (I’m 79), upset my wife his brash and highly aggressive attacks on her devotion to feeding and caring for crows. The first time he upbraided her was while she was walking one of the switchback trails in a small park. He demanded to see what was in the bag she was carrying. She told him it was none of his business. The exchange did not go well. The man assumed the obdurate stance of an ICE agent. I was with her the last time the man aggressively accosted our otherwise mellow walk to the street where we begin our running. My initial response was to tell him to go fuck himself. But I refrained. Instead, I approached him and tried to educate him on the more positive aspects of having crows in one’s neighborhood. The man was obsessed with rats. The rat population had gone up, and had done some damage to the wiring system of his RV, but the increase in the rat population had nothing to do with crows; it was due to a neighbor across the street digging deep trenches to renovate their sewage system. There is also a high population of rats to begin with on Queen Anne Hill since our neighborhood is only a mile or two distant from Pier 86, where three towering grain silos overlook a wharf for filling tankers with grain from the Palouse country in eastern Washington. I explained that crows outcompete rats for resources, and have been known to attack rats on occasion. I suggested that if he worried about rats damaging his property and nibbling on his wires, he might consider feeding crows. He found my suggestion pretty funny, and it was nice to see my friendly approach assuaged his hostility a little, but I don’t think I made much headway in softening or altering his stance against corvids.

I wanted stop feeding crows, but found it impossible to do so on my preferred route for running. Once you form a bond with a group of animals, it’s hard to break it. It’s emotionally draining. And the crows get crabby. I’ve seen a crow throw a tantrum on the sidewalk, extending his wings and cawing his head off. It’s also quite common to get bonked on the back of my head by a crow. It’s one of their favorite maneuvers. I’ve also been pooped on a number of times, but I’ve been told it’s good luck to get shit on by a crow. It feels like an egg running down my hair.

I began running down by Westlake Avenue North, on the west side of Lake Union, where there are rows of small, non-floating commercial buildings built on pilings over the water as well as some marinas and houseboat communities. The crows don’t know me there. I can run in peace. I also prefer it down there – with the notable exception of walking under the Aurora bridge traversing Mercer to get there, which is filthy with trash and human waste – because the space is so much more open, due to the lake. I hoped that after a year or two the crows in the neighborhood closer to home, which is a far more residential area, would forget me. They didn’t. Crows have a remarkable memory for faces, and if you’re deemed someone friendly to their cause, they will not let you forget that. People who argue that feeding crows encourages them to feel more comfortable around humans and thereby make themselves more vulnerable to the abuse of malefactors is dead wrong. Crows distinguish quite emphatically between humans who are in no way to be trusted to humans they perceive as non-violent and caring. Even then, they tend to keep their distance. It’s rare for a crow to get much closer to you on the ground than six or seven feet. Some do, which is always nice since it makes feeding them so much easier.

Today, I had a visit from Bonker. Bonker is a crow who lives on West McGraw Place. I call him Bonker because he likes to dive-bomb and hit me on the back of the head. He must know by now that I'm not the one who dispenses peanuts. That would be my wife. He never bonks her. He bonks me. I usually wear a wool hat. Maybe that’s why. He knows his claws can pierce my skin. I felt his wings as he passed within a quarter inch of my balding scalp. R gave him a peanut or two.

Louise is a special case. Louise is a crow with an injured leg. It hangs, useless and dead, while she manages to land and perch on her one good leg. I began feeding her ten years ago, in 2016, and have been feeding her ever since. She’s had a number of favorite spots over the years, but I was generally able to find her by whistling. After I began running down by Lake Union, R made a special walk to track her down and feed her. For several years there was a man a few years younger than me who was absolutely devoted to feeding her. He didn’t live in the neighborhood. He drove here. He would wait patiently for hours at a time. Unfortunately, his wife wanted to move south to Olympia, so he had to stop. That must’ve gone really hard with him. Louise disappeared for several weeks and we assumed the worse. The last time she came out I could see her one good leg buckle as she hit the ground. Her feathers get really scraggly during the summer as well. She barely has any tail feathers left. In early September all the crows start to molt and Louise’s feathers begin to grow back, which is a relief. R spotted her among a huge murder of crows on the other side of Queen Anne Avenue North, close to a Catholic grade school and convent. She does that occasionally; move to a different area. She does know where we live, and will follow us home in our car. R heard her once when she was working in the garden. That pattern was repeated for about a week and then she disappeared again. It’s impossible to say what exactly is going on with Louise. One thing is certain: she’s a survivor.

Louise reveals another aspect to crows that argues against the presumed worry that feeding them will somehow compromise their ability to hunt for food on their own. The crows do fine on their own. The peanuts are a treat, not a primary source of nutrition.

Louise, of course, has no idea we’ve named her Louise. Nor does anyone else. Others may have their own names for her. R has a crow she has named Russell (after Russell Crowe) who comes around nearly every day. It is my view that Russell should be named Jane Russell. I’m pretty sure Russell is a female. She disappeared for a few weeks and when she returned she was accompanied by two bratty fledglings.

Then there’s Buddy. Buddy’s a stellar jay, but a corvid nevertheless. On several occasions I’ve returned from a long run to find Buddy perched on the railing on our entryway porch. I had no peanuts with me, so I said wait here, I’ll be right back. I go in, get a couple of peanuts, and when I get back to the perch, Buddy is still waiting. Buddy tends to be fussy. Sometimes, if he feels the peanut is not quite up to his standards, he’ll drop it in expectation for another, which we oblige with a follow-up peanut. He’s a rude little punk and never leaves a tip.

I’ve heard crows give gifts to people whom they deem kind. It may not be gifts at all that they’re leaving, but a confluence of phenomena triggering instinctual behavior. Whatever it is, I’m still waiting for my BMW.

 

Paper Peacock Eye

 When sensations become words, words become sensations. For example, a wedding engagement. Or a bite of grapefruit. The augmentation of warmth in a room after dialing the thermostat up a few degrees. Arthritis. Bronchitis. Bursitis. Phlebitis. Age begs to voyage across the hallway tied to a sideboard. The sensation is considerable. It makes the road reflect your dollop of toss with a vague assertion of authority. The rue d’Orsel teems with sexual halibut. It makes you want to stir a canoe with your tongue. My emotions drift toward fulfillment with the excited chirping of newly hatched birds. Beat a man below the man we think we’ve become, and anguish soon follows. There are many species of anguish, including Hollywood and Vine. It’s cruel to give a man wealth after he’s turned ninety-one. Can anyone read this sentence while standing on their skin? Listen hard into a joy beneath its eating. I will climb on board and help throw cake at the variables. We hose our house with a horse of hose. The movement of a hoe, by any other noise, can move improbably fast. Someone sews a fiction near my grotto and I open into a flower. Anyone tin can see the elephant is a stab at paradox. Before abstraction, I had the rain in my hand, falling up like a pronoun. I put this paradigm here to mull over a concept of heaven. Everything growls in my life, even the more spiritual aspects. Hinduism appears as a demonstration of fireworks. A few of us turn violent, and translate ourselves as swirls. I can’t say I recommend it. It strains attitude, and causes seclusion. Knock before I cry. I feel a force that is mentally expansive steam my dreaming into a knife. The minerals I unfold glide into clapping. The infinite mode I make out of each fiber is my testament to compote. Hills open it.  Since what happens is stunning, and clacks like a noodle. This dream is a spectacular carnality such as it is in Cyprus on a Wednesday in July. Each incentive arrives with a song and a bruise. Below our tension my sweat is heavy as freight. The thermostat combines a bicycle with a honeysuckle and produces piles of vital signs, all of them intriguing as our needs. Gravity is not enough to describe the female breast. Secrets have veins, like a radio. If you wiggle the aggressions, you will tune in some irony. The mushrooms excuse our dimension. Consonants were squashed, and there was some harm done at a nearby airport. Sparks exhumed from a lamp black abandonment. I extend a detail to this in my preface. This is how the greenhouse was improbably enhanced, and the orchids fluttered with semantic instability. It’s my party and I can farm my aurora if want to. Spout salt. The iron evocation beyond is everything garish by tension and wealth. I was never everything a dollar could do on a Saturday in downtown Reno. I had butterflies in my voice. Life had the flavor of an ancestral bean. I think I held a scruple. There was a chocolate I could squat by yelling. Life isn’t always brocade. Sometimes it employs pickles, and starts an army of starving magicians. A sense unfolds itself to go chewing on another chiffon dime. Another calculus. Optical silk. Paper peacock eye. The clouds outside the steel, where a perspective bursts open. I hunger for cracks. It bubbles a sticky opium into what I needed just now. Another staircase for the proverbs rising out of my aviary. Anyone at a bronze job. We stand near the embroidery, redeeming denim. Sometimes an injury softly fluttered in gauze quivers beside it. Let me clean some gasoline and crackle the bounce of your Subaru with a blue bayou. The more seminal emotions crowd toward the palpable and spoon their genitals for time. It is a suppleness at its most dazzling. I can hallucinate almost anyone at the drop of a paradigm. The paragraph air will suffice until the greenhouse grins like a mood juggled with spit. If you look hard into the future, you can see it balancing on a preterite, coughing up metaphors. 

Cuticles Curlicues And A Life Of Fog

Language isn’t always about curlicues. A metaphysics works it. A moody ripple moves the there of it to the here of it. I see it as a grammar dripping the lines I use for daily existence. The dusty feeling I have for walking turns the pages of my life as I move from paragraph to paragraph. The words do everything. They tilted my forehead to look like Balzac. A hectic metaphor echoed across the ping pong table, causing actual presupposition.  I banged our paddle talk into the beyond, where it belongs, along with my Euclidean fish. Your orange ghost sells a wedding ring there much akin to swimming in our grain. Wilderness has a lot to say about prospect. In language, we roll toward wisdom, and ripen in wire. A solace plays inside it, a hugged ablution in among the lost attention spans. There are roots to it beyond the will to deformation. My cuticles spread into fingers sometime after all the trouble I had with most of everything. I quit construction to live a life of fog. In college, my thunder was almost conspicuous. But one night I paddled the Orinoco with Picasso. We felt the weight of it on our consciousness, and our eyes glowed with Fauvism. The local semen brought everyone news of our discovery. I cracked ocher with absence, and fed my legs to the wiles of the sidewalk. We pull on our ambitions, expecting them to stew into fierce simulations of fencing. Without them, we are walnut. Their balloons are neither going across the sentence as words or claiming semantic roles in a farrago of squirts, they’re serving the horizon of our love, and each has a palette with your face in it. I seldom howl at the sublime in my fire. Instead, I adjust my belt of roots and ape virtuosity. I feel friendly toward any acceptance of what I do with the ocean inside my head. Therefore, I shall release a mobius vapor to indicate the presence of a power beneath the snow. The ghost we pinned to the palate of our mouths is as sandstone as anyone they hire to play Hamlet. Something beyond wood fulminates this into another hymn. Each resource evades your ability to walk around in plus signs. You’re either a pulse, or a driver’s license test. This escalator is taking us somewhere without maps. I was against it tomorrow. I put it in a stream of consciousness, grabbed a marking pen, and wrote Ulysses. We sanded our grammar toward it, until it was soft, and had struts and asymmetries. My window has a heart. I include snaps on my jacket as a cause of sculpture. Coordinates carry my plans for a new day of pamphlets and cabbage. I fell off the planet swarming with harmonies and minutes later dilated with revelation. There is a dry monstrosity about the implications of work. This wanders around looking to redeem the faith in evasion. Until we let go and find ourselves in a Pascalian circumference, the grip that keeps squeezing our narratives until they burst beyond the hooks and knots of attachment will not undo its doing until it is done pursuing figures of speech and other forms of igloo. When I quit a sidewalk, I glow with the panic of it, and thunder to speculate what might become of the cracks when nobody stops to appreciate the quiddity of the unfamiliar. But I do. I take it in. All of it. The whole kit and caboodle. Then I cure it with silk and wear it like steam. And this exalts my spirit, and convulses like a bistro in Lisbon.  

Adventures In Is-Ness

If there are other worlds parallel to ours, worlds organized differently than ours, and following a different logic, poetry is the door to those worlds. Things might look the same, but that's not what's different. What's different is the tenor, the timbre, the qualia. The table I'm sitting at will be different, more detailed, more unique, more specific. The desk dates from early years of the past century. It belonged to my grandmother. She kept a diary at it, recording the harvests, the prices for wheat and milk and cream, deer hunts, bowling competitions, amounts of snow and rain, illnesses, injuries, births, deaths, repairs to the barn and people - such as myself - coming to visit. The desk is oak. I'll see rhythms in the grain, waves and undulations, the energy flowing through it. It has a flap that comes down to provide a surface for writing and an upper surface where I keep a bottle of water, a clock, a pheasant feather quill from a Renaissance Faire north of San Francisco, a paperweight, a pair of Bose noise-canceling earphones, and a lamp. What seems other about this world is the way it has been defamiliarized. It looks the same but different. The Russians have a word for this: ostranenie. Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky introduced the term in his 1917 foundational essay "Art as Technique." It describes the poetic technique of framing common, everyday things in a manner that makes them appear strange and unfamiliar, as if being experienced for the first time. It is a different experience than endlessly scrolling an electronic screen looking for a dopamine hit and novel sensation. It is far more immersive and crosses the boundary between self and non-self, categorized and non-categorized. There are no categories. No classifications. There are only pluralities. It is more like reading Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. Suddenly, the language people use exchanging rumors and niceties at a dinner table and framing their narratives in tidy packets of information turns into a semantic wilderness, a vast, unpredictable ocean of mists and monsters, nautical perversions and Jurassic chandeliers. Life pulses through it turning the veins purple, the eyes obsidian, and the combinations combustible and endless. When I sat down I was human, and when I stood up flocks of starlings flew out of my eyes. 

Everything Is Alright

This need for inference is beginning to intone its inflation around vermilion, which pulses like beeswax in a voluptuous clairvoyance. My feet remain swollen during their punctuation. Buttons everywhere are an enthralling employment. I hold this sensation to be a critical dynamic, pertinent as wire through an umbrella. It floats some of the oddest reveries it has been my pleasure to indulge. The mind fulminates with the ambiguity of this moment, this juncture of form, and sets a canvas with spouts in eight inches of snow. As you can see, someone has ruffled my problem. Look at all these gardens in books. Who waters these words? Whose eyes bring them into being? Whose bruises argue with the dreams they create? Whose arms hold nothing as if it were bald, and attracted butterflies? I can’t say. I’m just here for the mints.

The congeniality of tea is a fulcrum among the lovers of firth and flimflam. This fabric of woof and warp inhabits nothingness like a poem ratchets a bolt on a bridge of sighs. I will answer to everything during a splash of cologne. Seclusion is a thing in the mud coughing up rubies of linguistic spinet. I attempt visiting a monstrosity as someone on the shore waves frantically. I saw a puddle in the street once perturb itself through a sorcery of mood and wind applied with the precise amount of languor. Meanings are garish and lyrical. They should be used sparingly, like mushrooms and honey. Sparrows notice anything in the sand positioned by toys and dowagers. Everyone crawls toward a novel perspective as if their lives depended on it. It’s a statement of power. Nothing is ever a problem, until it gets up and dances in a spirited ecstasy, chuckles a rascally syntax. 

I thermostats it all into a tidepool. All my secrets are pullulated by ganglion. I push them about in a crappy wheelbarrow. A mind with arms lifts a thought by the measure of its tongue and viscera. Think of it as a texture. Extrude a winch. Someone crinkles our constancy into a tension we later resolve with a chocolate reality. Savor this kiss after it ceases clattering across the floor and pondering our feet. I feel like an astronomer dipped in gossip. Please amuse this.

Bitumen includes all of my misgivings despite its indispensable taste. I enjoy wearing denim after a parody of wind. The pop of it. The astringency of it. I have seen a palace alter its gantry in the middle of a sentence, and carry it at death into a nearby cave. I turn and clench the surrounding space like a coincidence, which squirms inside my glee as it gets expansive. And everything is alright.

Blue Suede Shoes

Believe it anyway. Bend everybody toward the horizon. My despair just happens to eschew myopia. A highway is never about distance. It emerges from a need for speed and has a way to make that happen. The revelatory is nowhere near a study. The smash of those ideas was unrivalled behind the studio until we poured lighter fluid on the charcoal briquettes and all hell broke loose. We were all affectionately rippled by its music there. I painted the gulp the army took at the Mexican border. If sophisticated alive as we had been, we found ourselves going at it there. The bas-relief of it. The truth of it. The physicality of it. Everything moving forward. Everything exaggerated. All the deformations tooled by desperate philosophers. 

We throw hints at the wall hoping for something like an accordion to drive around in music. The snow is at it again, flowering into snowmen as it falls. I like to rub what we feel together. This generates work for some of us. We don’t mind. Most autonomy already dwells in it. The fish tube. The unpredictable. The granite kitchen counter. Build there among its coils. I will gush holes, and excel at coasting. The Pythagorean fiber slashed beneath us offered drugs of a sort no one was familiar with. All we remember is that it was made of math and fountained numbers. My sleeves still simmer from the flight. The twitching guzzles at blood.

If there is indeed a beyond, don’t drive with cruel intent. Drive with refinement and sophistication. There’s a vividness in today’s poetry that has yet to be further explored for its moonshine. There’s a start there. We should get going before anyone can figure out what the sidewalks were trying to tell us. What the blots were about. What the cracks meant. Anybody clashing beside our ablutions is welcome to convulse in its grace and beauty. The engines lure everyone into a false conclusion, which keeps the story going. Emotions run deep. But I can’t tell you how I feel. There are no words for it. I feel compelled to wear a mask. Anything we glitter is fine by me. The orchid’s architecture has a sense of hemorrhagic vertigo. They grow so powerfully I think it comes from their grace and delicacy. I like to watch people chew their points into glaciers. The rest of the journey is optional. But you might want to hang around anyway. The glow we pound aloud at Christmas has a gluttonous plan to get us through the season with our gloves off and our vulnerability showing. Which proves nothing. Gravity is just all feathers. 

A deliverance of unprecedented bubbles has arrived in time for the festivities. The world swirls around in a gyrational West Virginia dance. I set an escalator inside its basis. I get ugly straining to lift a world beside a theorem. What the singing did was topaz. We meditated above its resilience. Everything bristles on the escalator. What a dusty world we’ve all become. The escape toward its percussion gave us hope for an evening of Proust and apple cider. A souvenir gut they clubbed into inanition. We should each shoot this sand as we would a pillow or a sachet. Confusion twists it among gestures. We walk without direction. Our story, meanwhile, spirits gleefully along waving at anyone and anything. 92.3FM, Las Vegas. There must be some kind of way out of here said the joker to the thief. You get the picture. ‘67 Mustang. Top down. Desert air blowing through your hair.

My blue suede shoes have since become language. I’ve learned how to pull my weight along a path of awakening during a concentration induced from chaos. This signals the garments in which I languish. The gravity engines idle in a steady prolongation of weightless optimism. The solace of a comb does it with nothing. I am my own hair, and I wear it with a cognizance of baldness creeping in. Someone somewhere goes to cry privately somewhere else during the language that curls around our motorcycle repair shop in downtown Metaphor. Somebody burst this drawer open and letters and underwear went flying through the air. Can anyone out there fold my exhilaration into a Bob Dylan song? If we leave right now, we can reach the end of this sentence before sun comes up and the 3:10 from Yuma goes by and the period makes it final. This has been a poem. It had me wondering. I wasn’t sure. It made me feel weird. I’ve never owned any blue suede shoes. But I do now.  

 

Three Prose Poems

                                          Hibiscus

And so. What now, my little angels? Where to? And what for? It's always the same old story. Birth, death, reincarnation as a Goodyear tire. Don’t start me rolling. Once I get going, it’s difficult to stop. Even when things start looking cataclysmic, catastrophic, and fungal. Slowly, chestnut by chestnut, I will make another ocean. Meanwhile, I’m going to go get the laundry. I swear, if you listen closely, you can hear an egg-timer in the Stone's "Can't You Hear Me Knocking." It’s what I use to remind me I’ve got some laundry to attend to. Things to mend. Fellowships to restore. Trunks to pack. Memories to unpack. Grace means more than clean underwear. It means never having to say thank you for choosing me I won’t let you down. I never cared much for that role. I was more of a see you later alligator guy. Or at least I pretended to be. The reality was different. As it always is. That’s the dark side of reality: it’s real. I miss every person to whom I’ve said goodbye. And never said hello again. It’s why I’m drawn to art. There's nothing like going up to an attic in the summer and finding objects enchanted with the dust of obfuscation. You clear the webs and find the time to put your nose into a big bowl of meringue. And wonder what happened to books and affordability. Redemption and hiding. Privacy and hobbies. The radio on late at night. The Goon Show. And a hibiscus.

                     We All Saw It Coming

 

We all saw it coming. But we could never agree on where it came from. My life began with Rimbaud. And ended with profligacy, industrial seasonings, and imbecility. It felt like being in a Sam Shepherd play. And then everything happened. Chaos. Camels. And lipstick. The pyramids were mighty and gave us a sense of assurance. Death lies beneath everything. There are three things in life you can always count on: problems, accidents, and ping pong. Everything else makes me quiver. I can hardly stand, much less sing. Is this an age in which to think about publication? Why not? The show must go on. I can’t help admire certain paradoxes, my favorite being the authenticity of fiction and the lies that go hand in hand with truth. And thank god for cognitive dissonance. Or just plain dissonance. And the many problems that brought me here, looking for you to help me solve them. Some things are so irrational they deserve a suite at the top of the Ritz. You can paint anything you want if you have your own calamity and a place to do it. This is a Bob Dylan song. He never wrote it. I did. I like Bob Dylan. And there was time and consideration. Hippopotamus. Old oak doors. The soft orange clouds of a Wyoming morning. The end feels surprisingly similar to the beginning. And that makes me circular. Fashionably nonlinear. And sexy as a remedy for work.

                             Knock Knock

 

Knock knock. Who’s there? Anarchy. Anarchy who? None of your business. Well, come back later none of my business, when you’re feeling a little more garrulous and less anarchic. You old libertarian you. Here’s what I think: back in paleolithic times I’ll bet women did go hunting with the men. Women are better at spotting details than men. As for raising children, I’m hesitant to speculate. I’ve only raised one human being. And that was me. And I failed. Repeatedly. The possibilities were daunting. I got lost in alternatives. Diversions. I matured more like a gingko biloba than an arugula. I made so many bad decisions it’s a miracle I’m still here. I had a penchant for getting lost in details. It’s a feminine trait, but I’m proud to be a fop. It takes a real man to be a sissy. Hotspur can take his toxic masculinity elsewhere. I’m riding my favorite rocket to the far edge of the known universe and having a shot of bourbon, a corned beef sandwich, and a good long look at nothing. Anyone knocks on the door, tell them I’m indisposed. I’m busy reminiscing. And I’ve got a lot to reminisce. Don’t Go Now. Paint It Black. A Day in the Life. I don’t want to see you go. But you’d better go now. I’ll save you a seat when the shit hits the fan. And I put the flap of my old oak desk up a final time.

 

Anything Henna

 I grieve against it. Those who hold that life in a bubble is unfulfilling are probably spies from another hairstyle. My components revolt against another eye. Another elevation unfolding a drum circle. Mountains scud through everything. They all deserve iron. Therefore, pleasure becomes a sizzling inclusion of everything.

Most hives include the twinkle of it. I’m sticky from it. Molasses on the stove. Most occurrences occur as a result of strongly held feelings. Our forever jingling with vital exceptions. A kiss during spurts. A gasoline spout about to release Seattle. I feel more strongly about henna. Anything henna is fine by me.

Some of our friends are dead. Power is nobody’s friend. That’s not what it’s for. Sometimes a painter paints the wrong carrot. Carrots don’t look like Blaise Pascal. Carrots look like carrots. I’m diving in circles today. As you can see. There are ripples fastened to this image of summer. I tried to tell you this morning. I climbed into another version of myself. It had Beach Boy vibes. I’m doing this during good vibrations humming in all the wires. Panic in panoply. Planet Earth in deep shit.

Don’t worry, baby. Consumerism isn’t half bad when you’re on the sweet side of eighteen. You’ll spend the rest of your life hunting for that youth. Unless you wise up. Space is enriched by space. Time is enriched by time. Therefore, be merry and climb into your chrysalis. I’m calling on all the gods in history to come down and help us figure this whole thing out. My eyebrows sound like aquariums. My bones go bone to bone inciting riots and crippled pentameters. Writing makes its incisions apparent in indecisions. Paradigms box the war. War wins. The sky thunders. My premonitions break their harness and race toward the horizon. I feel like I have a wormhole in my life collapsing spacetime parameters. I remember when a dime could haul your ass into a peepshow and a quarter got you a nod from Tom Waits. The salty slop between Seattle’s piers was constellated with jellyfish. Winter draped the city with mist. I am a lineman for the county filled the waves. Immediacy felt urgent as getting my pants on during a fire. Before our destiny became a manufactured consent. And then no consent. Just a rant on TikTok.

Pink New Moons In The Green Room

 Seattleites are a lot like planets. On the surface, they’re all ice and mystery. But at their molten core, metals combine into mermaids and meat hooks glow on the retina. Occasionally, and quite often, strangely enough, in used bookstores, you’ll come across a maidenhair fern steeped in the dark, fertile soil of a Romanian pessimist. Approach them gently, cautiously, but not so cautiously you look like a stalker. And if you get lucky and start a conversation, use your inner radar, speak simply, speak wisely. Don’t act like Lord Byron. Don’t come off like Madonna. These are shy, suspicious, sensitive souls. They take flight at the slightest mention of you know who. They vanish in an instant. They leave you feeling like you’ve just had a quick visit to fairyland, or André Breton visiting Quebec. That charged little moment is now a musty section of moldy sci fi. The hush of isolation, and a copy of Emile Cioran. But if you’re smitten, truly stricken, and have the inner ambience of a Mongolian yurt, you can sometimes find them through a telescope, their celestial bodies pulsing with outer space nirvana. A cold yet eerily beautiful surface.  Glaciers. Jagged outcrops. Lush valleys, bushy and damp. In every Seattleite beats the heart of a latent, pre-millennial Californian. Who hasn't, at one time or another, wanted to shed their clothing and become a wet glitter? A bold new version of life. It goes on all the time. Pink new moons in the gloom room.

 

River Cruises On The Danube

River cruises on the Danube have been disrupted due to drought. France is being devoured by fire. Homelessness is illegal in Indiana. What a beautiful deposition I could make. Dyspeptic assessments of the modern age. Indictments of society as hot and perverse as anything I witnessed in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. And on my laptop, too. Meanwhile, what are you doing until the Humvees pass? How about a picnic? Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. When the ground is damp, and alligators swim in the streets, it is suitable to get dry in a place of searing beauty. We can create a gaiety quite easily. By playing one word against another, the parameters expand into exhilarating idiosyncrasies. Honeycomb textures on Mars discovered by the Mars Rover robot. A tiger shark floating in formaldehyde. Worth millions. An unmade bed, complete with used condoms and empty vodka bottles, shortlisted for the Turner Prize and later sold for 2.5 million pounds. Robotic dogs with tech-CEO heads. And there it is: that telltale roar. The sky screaming as it gets sucked into the engine of a Super Hornet. Blue Angels. Loud and acrobatic in the sky above the city. High-performance climbs. Breathtaking dives. Coming in low. Thanks for the tinnitus, boys. Why does our culture have to be so militaristic? I would’ve made a terrible Viking. I can see my ancestors across the river, looking at me sadly and shaking their heads. Their helmeted heads. The story continues until the water stops boiling and the rice falls silent. Most people experience significant everyday life, but they express it in different ways. It’s everyone’s prerogative to be at least a little weird. What are you doing right now to fill the room with delight? I could soon be in the shadows, amusing myself with theories of gray, and sprinkling your arm with a river cruise.

 

The Birth Of Going Somewhere Else

I don't know about you, but I'm burning to get backstage and see what the whole thing was about. It had something. There was something there. And then it vanished. It was real. But the word ‘real’ diminishes its scope. Its exquisite pulsations. Whatever it was. It had something. Had something going. You can't say that about everything. The northern lights maybe. Orange Julius. But nothing that specific. It had no form, nothing palpable, nothing you could put in your mouth. Just hints. Clues. Intimations. Vague premonitions. Bad jokes that make you laugh inside. Unsettling intuitions. Curious moments of dissociation. It always feels like it’s on the verge of something. Something hair-raising. Something savage and cauterized. Something passionately devoted but tragically anachronistic. The air trembles with its presence. You’d think it was indestructible. And yet it’s subject to the caprices of time. The whims of the zeitgeist. The high cost of gas. A big-ticket cheap thrill. These things are vain. Though satisfying in many other regards, they have none of its mystery. And it already feels like it's crumbling, fading away like a really good song. It’s hard to hang on to this stuff. Because it’s immaterial. And it’ll never be the same. It’s getting harder and harder to find words for it. Most people are in a hurry to get from one job to another. They don’t have time for this kind of nonsense. Even though it’s vital. Indispensable. Critical. And although these edges crack with thunder, they serve a purpose. The scene across the street is too close for comfort. And I think that’s it. The birth of going somewhere else.

Getting there is another matter. Somewhere else might be a long distance. It can be far as your youth or intimate as nowhere at all. You’ll need transport. And transport has a long history. There’s more to it than yachts and private jets. Harleys are cool but they’re no good on this terrain. We need a long warm rapture. An ascendant descending. I’m doing what I can while waiting for a pair of little wings of mine to warm up and take me somewhere. Somewhere else. Something outside the usual parameters, the secure comforts of normalcy. Though that seems to be disappearing, too. There was a long intermission, a long darkness, during which the props got changed, and our seats were different, and what appeared to be a colossal chandelier above is now a web of creepy surveillance. The antidote is antiquated. I hesitate to even mention it. Someone might hear me. And turn away in mockery. Or horror. Nobody listens anyway, not when you’re this old and you don’t have a podcast or an invitation to appear on Joe Rogan. What I’m talking about isn’t digital. It acquires some attention. Jesus, I sound old. Look what age did to me. Too late to repair the damage. But sense enough to thrive on the energy of despair.

Art moves line by line. Note by note. This is why Mahler’s adagietto moves so slowly. Then picks up speed. Urgency. Phenomena like this often occur during a trance. Music is to trance what alpine is to high winds. Actual to the point of putting a fat feather in a skinny hat. It's a cheese that can only be swallowed when its weight is understood to smoke the century like a chandu of opium. Which is a roundabout way of saying cowlick. We try not to get too fancy around here. Language is meant to be translucent. Some things languish in obscurity. And some things achieve a good standing. Art shatters quickly. The market can’t always keep up. A tale of music should include at least one speedboat to get us there quickly. It doesn’t have to be real. It just needs to float. And leave a good wake behind it.

I pool as a gravy unfolding its syntax on a ramification. Tin roof during space with a rain on it scattered my titration. And somehow it came together and formed a narration, a puddle of lightning with a saloon in it and people playing cards. It’s not hard to make a poem chirp like a mockingbird. We do it in our prosody zone. This is a place conducive to gasoline. It’s a conceit I learned from Gregory Corso. Fuel, ignition, the high-octane rush of language. Or was it Duchamp’s love gasoline? Fluid for a mechanical allegory. I can’t remember. It’s funny. Some memories are weird as ears. Others are confusing as lines to see a shitty movie. We live in a city where things are a little hard to grasp. Sooner or later you’re going to come face to face with a QR code. Or a Cyclops going 80 mph on an ebike. Very little makes sense to me in a city with eleven billionaires, more dogs than children, a subterranean ghost town, a museum of bad art, the highest rate of UFO sightings per capita, nightly gun battles on Aurora, and a troll under the Fremont bridge. And to think this was the birthplace of grunge. And Jimi Hendrix. And pickleball.

Let me start again. I’m on the wrong track here. I can’t keep everything filtered out of my language. So why try? Why not just let it hang out like bedsheets on a clothesline? Let’s move even further away from meaning: here in this neck of the woods a work is a riotous amalgamation beyond our control, a broken sprocket after a faulty conception of sawdust. Anyone can loop into a batch of someone if the drool of being has anything in it resembling hair. Earth tones east of Cle Elum help disencumber summer from the damp of early June. Umber has roots in Ice Age cave art. Its grammar has a glamour that is handily subterranean. And yet there are things about it that verge on frailty. Few of us inhabit caves these days. I shall pursue this ignis fatuus another time. Do you mind if I open a new line of credit? I ponder a breathy vowel as a parody of pig iron but feel the foundry of its origin may be tethered to an ocellated turkey. Later, I’ll sort through a few of my mistakes to see if I can redeem anything. That’s how strong my love is. I get ideated and go beyond the snow to see how big the world can get when it’s not real property. This is my silhouette in letters, and what your eyes can see is an open field. We must rely on our dexterity to pull us through, and find our inner ukulele.    

A Button For Bangkok

I’m here to drink life, he shouted, and ordered another bottle with a memorable afternoon agitating its hues. We understand what's there, the paradise of the perplexed, the sunbeam born in a large oval bowl of contrary feelings. Yes. Yes. That's it, my heart digging into the sky with a spade of art. The squabble that’s been aging for over twenty years like a slice of demented cheese. Overturned. Flipped. The warm feeling that costs nothing but buzzes all night like a beehive. I can taste the sky in every carrot, every plunge into Buddhism, every cathedral full of songs, every little distinction breaking its barriers and getting controversial. I believe that nothing is truly nothing, and did so when the sidewalk aggrandized its cracks and idiosyncrasies, and the only one to take notice was a Yorkshire Terrier named Isidore Ducasse. I believe in zig, I believe in zag, I believe in zigzags, chin sags and dishrags. I believe the best location for viewing the stars is a strip mall with her ingots in a bra. This is why. Why I honor the mending stick that sensitizes the cracked musk of Mongolia. Why I sit here listening to a dying language talk to the body of work between my hands. I believe every tattoo loves the skin it’s on. That the fates like to tease people. That irony is their favorite prod. And billionaires are their biggest joke. That nobody gets. We’re all still waiting for the punchline.

There's a place where one can manipulate one's symptoms near our most primitive instinct. This has led to a situation in which we glaze our despair with the shine of metaphor. I have, for this reason, decided to bark at the traffic. Over the winter, I think about phenomena that can ignite a light in the mind. The first thing I notice is pretty. The second thing I notice is ugly. The third thing I notice is gambling on the ambiguity of beauty, the electric-blue body and crimson head of the Malayan Coral Snake. Rita Hayworth in Gilda. The eerie bioluminescence of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. The secret heart of poetry, which can destroy a life while giving it its ultimate meaning. Which is a filet of cardboard jerked east by the spasmodic gusts of rain sweeping the Times Square Billboard. Which is an alligator unzipping its throat and out pops the flower missing from every bouquet. Which smells of swamps and semen. And is the source of all sorcery and the forgeries of the divine.  

There’s a stain of geography on the globe. If you stare at it a long time it becomes a country populated by jugglers and vagabonds. There are many active volcanos and picnics and rash, chaotic assemblies. That’s the arctic on top and calculus on the bottom. The land of a thousand infatuations. A here and now that runs contrary to Monday. I feel warm towards someone in the hope their shoes may one day engulf them in foam. It’s how I sharpen my instincts on the roots of a western red cedar. My obscurity feeds on the galaxies surrounding our Abbagenesis. Did you know that there are twelve million swimming pools on Proxima b? It gives me a reason to employ a semicolon in a contextual gallimaufry. But I’m not in the mood just now. I’ve got a bunch of crazy ideas built out of wire, immoderate articulations and aromatic philosophies to put on display for nobody in particular. Life is a big mosaic but sometimes the landlord wants his son back and a cop below in the street is talking to you through a megaphone. Irony glitters everywhere. When things go wrong there’s usually something right that made it available in the first place. It’s how we like it here. Ribbons of contrary air shaking a patch of devil’s walking stick, a volume of Emily Dickinson on my lap and 70 degrees in the shade.

I think it’s time that I faced reality. I have a face for the quick, a face for the many cycles of life, and a face for gazing out of coffeehouse windows on rainy days. But I don’t have a face for reality. I’ve got a face for daydreaming, which has been the bane of supervisors and a frequent cause for dismissal, a face that sometimes looks back at me from the bathroom mirror and bears a disturbing similarity to the face of my father, long deceased, which gives his likeness an added jolt, and a face which is really more of a mask that I find convenient for socializing and playing poker in the Ozarks. There are 32 to 33 individual muscles in the human face, depending on how they’re counted, the temperature and humidity of a given circumstance, the weight of the emotion being lifted into expression, and the level of transparency with which one feels comfortable. I like the faces painted by Francis Bacon. I find their distortions to be apt reflections of the world’s current realities, the various contortions of logic and daily complications with which the human experiment must now cope. The face is theatrical. It’s a device. It’s something to hide behind. And for those who refuse to face reality, there’s Botox. And for those who do, there’s Clint Eastwood. Which is Hollywood’s way of saying stand tall, smoke a cigar, and squint. It’s not reality. But it is entertaining. And then there’s Renée Jean Falconetti, who played Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s 1928 version. The intensity is jaw-dropping. Antonin Artaud – as sympathetic bailiff and interrogator Jean Massieu - speaks to her on the stake, about to be burned alive. “Tell me, how can you still believe that you were sent by God?” “His ways are not our ways.” And you can see the shock of anguish and passion subtly manifesting the power of the sublime in her fatigued mortal eyes.

How much does existence weigh? This will largely depend on the fulcrum of your generosity. If I believe my nose has an opinion about the smell of morning, the meanings and the seriousness of things here grow exponentially, and this will include the humidity of farce. Don’t Worry Baby, sang the Beach Boys, so many years ago they seem freeze-dried in beauty. A beauty, shall we say, of a particular time, a particular place, and a particular feeling. The time was 1965, the place was Cupertino, and the feeling was an awakening of passion that felt completely new and wonderful to my being. A fullness of being it felt awkward to contain. It’s always so gratifying to discover someone else who shares your opinions, especially when they emerge from the scribbles and jungles of the unconscious. We strive to be rational. Most of us do, I think. There are those other needs, however, that don’t get properly acknowledged in a culture such as ours, where the emphasis in the universities is on STEM, the gods of technology and the money to be made in real estate and war. The humanities have been kicked to the curb. Which is also where a lot of the homeless now find themselves. Others dream larger. Others dream of one day finding a button for Bangkok on the eighth floor of a Supreme Being. Others look for otherness in a world of lusterless and colorless dualities. Good, bad. Up, down. Open, close. Democrat, Republican. Right wing, left wing. Love, hate. And so on. And so on is where I live. Not the so-so. I’m not a so-so person, not generally. What I am mainly is someone who gets on an elevator and if I ever see a button for Bangkok, I’m pressing it. And when the doors open, I’m getting off. And if I find myself in Budapest, I’ll find a café and order a chimney cake. And so on.

The gravity of a certain house hides someone beyond the distance to Saturn, who neither cracks their theories with granite nor writes the poetry of navigation with textbook cachet. It is because we have plugs that electricity can exist in a constant state of franchise. I use it to brush my teeth, dry my hair, and illumine the face in the mirror looking back at me with worry and supposition. I garden the cartilage of language with the power of bone. Anybody familiar with a philodendron can regret an afternoon rain spent on clothing a circumstance with habit. You know how it goes: thought unravels a fist of earth and discovers propagation. This starts everything dancing in a mania of dancing girl ginger. A groan by tumble is everything it precedes, and ends with a filigree motif. It’s how I met your mother and taught her the ways of our people. We grew our curls against the admonitions of the ambivalent and nobody scattered what seeds we had to implicate the grace of nothingness. And this is how hypnosis was invented, and the loveliness of paint became a mutable stimulus against the tendencies of form. 

Everything is diesel when it comes to maintaining a train of thought. Its fluidity is semiformal, which makes it ideal for drinking, proselytizing, and the glamour of doing nothing. I have often considered a poem built on nothing but antediluvian grammar to spring from its autonomy within the sentence to become a tumult of flickering eczema. And by everything, I mean anything. Anything and everything except jaundice, Mongolian grapefruit, and purgatory. These respond better to eucalyptus oil. Dry shaving on steel from any buffet will enhance the hibachi oysters. All these moods make me frown at what I acknowledge by omission. What more can I do to fortify the milk against the its chastity of its flavor? The chrome whistle demanded the innocent markings of the lotus no one ruminates in a taxi. And so we added antifreeze to its rhetoric and wept with joy by the go-go fountain.

I am so my own fog that a galaxy can frame it in buckles. This will now be my experience of you. I have an arrival in my elevator that is here for the benefit of your bloodstream. I say this out of respect for the hermitage convulsing in the ground of our reflection. That one day I felt your ensemble near me I almost spurred my endeavor to greater and greater intrigues, and came close to spitting guitars at a seeming indecision. Instead, I considered us as a gift, and held your eyes in my palette. I trembled as I dipped my brush in the goo of your sexual splendor. There are luxuries in getting here before I excel at eggnog. One of which is really just a rattlesnake shake away from being utterly inappropriate. I never fret over the thickening of a word in the wilderness of my mouth. Language isn’t just another appliance, a way to focus our calculus on parallels of salvation, but a perturbance crucial to our vertigo and a place like Bangkok to broaden our labials.  

Some Thoughts (Ten Years Later) On Bob Dylan Winning The Nobel Prize For Literature

It has been ten years since Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This decision made complete sense to me. I’m glad that he received this prestigious award. Forget the music: the scope and power of his lyrics are easily as thought provoking and imaginative and abundant in feeling as much of the literature produced over the several centuries the United States has existed as a democratic and cultural experiment. I’m not so sure the U.S. is still a democracy, or that a culture this heavily invested in technology and military power compares all that favorably with the art of the Italian renaissance or the misty glazes, delicate shapes and colorful porcelains of the Song and Ming Dynasties of China, but that’s a separate issue. The U.S. – despite its obsessive exaltations of practicality and profit - has produced some great art and has often been at the forefront of aesthetic developments – quantum leaps in the fields of literature an painting and especially music with the birth of jazz - and Bob Dylan stands unequivocally as one of our finest artists. That said, I’ve never really been all that comfortable with Dylan’s award, I’ve had a stubborn ambivalence nagging at my fullhearted appreciation, and this despite being a massive Dylan fan my entire life. There’s a reason for that reluctance, and it has to do with the cancerous rise of illiteracy and the demise of literary culture. Reading. Thinking. Books. Dylan’s Nobel Prize hit the literary world like a neutron bomb.

Dylan was able to introduce his audience to an unequivocal literary orientation, whether they were aware of it or not, via a powerful delivery mechanism called music. Give a poet a literary venue to perform their work and they’ll be lucky to get an audience of more than five or ten people, most of whom are friends and family. Taylor Swift, on the other hand, draws 68,000 to 72,000 attendees to one of her concerts. Bob Dylan himself, at age 85, still draws 2,000 to 6,000 people, preferring to play at smaller venues. The overall age at the poetry readings I’ve attended in the last few years has been somewhere between 60 and 70. Younger people don’t read. They scroll.

This has been a profoundly demoralizing problem for me. I’ve devoted my entire life to literature. There were a lot of famous poets around when I was 18 back in 1966: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950. It wasn’t quite so embarrassing back then if a friend or relative let it slip at a family or social gathering that one fancied oneself a poet. It conjured images of Lord Byron and old Walt Whitman with his biblical beard and a butterfly perched on his index finger. It was embarrassing, but survivable. If someone mentions that I write poetry I cringe with red-faced horror and inwardly try to make myself invisible.

Some years ago, I wrote an essay about a book Dylan wrote that MacMillan published in 1971 called Tarantula, although it was written between 1964 and 1966, when Dylan was at his most avant-garde and surreal phase. I referred to Tarantula as my favorite Dylan album. And I meant it. I still mean it. I love that book. It gives me joy every time I dip into its pages. There’s music in it, but music of a different order than drums and electric guitars. If Dylan had received a Nobel Prize for Tarantula, I’d be ecstatic. The rest of the world would be scratching its collective head.

Tarantula is a crazy book. The language is mercurial, volatile, bursting with energy. It flirts comedically with chaos, à la the Marx Brothers, using William Burroughs' cut-up technique to make conventional language shiver and fragment in a carnivalesque escapade of improbable contrasts and conflicting ideas. Every time I read this book—and I've been reading this book for approximately 56 years—I feel like I'm growing new neurons, making connections and interrelationships that further expand the arena of my sensorium, obliterate the limits of my intellect, and provide me with fresh insights into what passes for cultural norms and the bogus narratives of a heavily supervised reality. It's an exhilarating experience, not dissimilar from the effects of cocaine or drugstore amphetamines, in particular those Benzedrine inhalers Kerouac used for writing On The Road.

Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan’s autobiography published by Simon and Schuster in 2004, is another of one my all-time favorite books. I’ve read it twice, the first time for content, the second time for style. Chronicles is written with a highly infectious and engaging manner. Dylan is famous for keeping his private life to himself, but Chronicles is amiable and intimate in ways that are surprisingly revealing, openly searching and insightful into Dylan’s creative evolution and later struggles in ways that may have been epiphanous to himself as he wrote it. Chronicles is a very open book. There’s a creative energy flowing through its sentences that keep its prose alive and young and prevent it from stiffening into a nursing home sciatica. The descriptions of times and places and cities and musical journeys are colorfully written, making a brocade of highly imaginative metaphors, vivid physical sensations and dynamic emotions. For example, here’s a description of some motorcycles he came across while working with Daniel Lanois in New Orleans on the album that would become Oh Mercy:

Lanois and his crew kept a bunch of vintage Harleys parked out back and in the courtyard of the studio. Mostly Panheads with Hydra-Glide front forks, chrome driving lamps, mostly solo seated, wide tires, tombstone taillights. I had to have one of these bikes. Mark Howard, one of Dan’s engineers and motorcycle enthusiast found me one – a ’66 Harley Police Special, out of Florida with a powder-coated frame, stainless steel spokes, black-powdered rim and hubs, everything original and it ran good.

I love the details of this. The writing itself takes on some of the panache of the Harley machinery and there’s a sense of immediacy and joy to the exhilaration these bikes are famous for. Considering Dylan’s fondness for machinery and raw, mechanical power (Dylan is a skilled welder; there was an exhibition of his welded iron gates at the Halcyon Gallery in London in November, 2013, titled Mood Swings) I’d love to get his take on Swiss artist Jean Tinguely who was known for creating complex, whimsical, and often chaotic moving sculptures out of scrap metal and found objects. There’s always been a goofy, contrarian spirit to many of Dylan’s songs – “Outlaw Blues,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” and “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream” to name a few – which makes it convenient for me to weld Dylan’s scrap iron ballads to Tinguely’s junkyard ballets.

The reason I took to poetry is largely due to Dylan’s influence. Hearing “Like A Rolling Stone” blast from a friend’s back speakers on a summer odyssey in 1965 going from junkyard to junkyard looking for car parts is largely what sparked that lifelong obsession, so Dylan’s Nobel Prize feels in some ways like a validation and in other ways like a corrosive acid poured on a dying media of print and literature. Dylan didn’t receive the Nobel Prize for his books, he received it for his music. This left me, and a thousand other struggling writers, out in the cold. It’s why my feelings about it are so conflicted, jumbled up like broken dreams in a rotating barrel of ambivalence. The hoopla has died down over the last ten years and the question rarely arises anymore, but if asked what I thought of Dylan’s Nobel Prize, I can’t give an honest answer. I simply don’t have one. As much as I love albums like Blonde and Blonde and Time Out of Mind and even his most recent one, Rough and Rowdy Ways, they won’t ever replace the shrinking inventories of bookstores, or the handful of veterans at poetry readings who haven’t got the memo yet. The war is over, and we lost. Charles Bukowski, bless his soul, is still quite popular on YouTube. So there’s that. But that spring day in Minneapolis on April 30^th, 1956, when T.S. Eliot drew 14,000 people to the Williams Arena (the basketball facility at the University of Minnesota) to give a lecture on “The Frontiers of Criticism,” will not see its like in this era any time soon. Funny, too, when I think about it. 1956 was the first time I saw Elvis Presley perform. He appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. I was 9. I went wild. Why oh why oh why I continually lament looking back on that moment, did not I follow his lead, and learn to play the fucking guitar?

Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature over the last ten years have gone to actual writers: László Krasznahorkai (Hungary), Han Kang (South Korea), Jon Fosse (Norway), Annie Ernaux (France), Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania/Britain),  Louise Glück (United States), Peter Handke (Austria), Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Kazuo Ishiguro (Britain). I feel compelled to admit, quite shamefully, that with the exception of Louise Glück, I haven’t read any of their books. Clearly, I have a lot of catching up to do. I need to fill that rather large hole I left in my jeremiad. Books haven’t gone the way of the dinosaurs just yet, albeit ChatGPT is a pretty damn big asteroid. And at age 78, soon to turn 79, maybe I should think about taking up the guitar, if anything just to learn that that’s not where my talent lies. And what am I thinking anyway: I’ve still got a mountain of books to read.

 

Can't You Hear My Egg Timer?

Why does my egg timer keep going off in the Stones’s “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” It’s an odd, insistent, inconsistent, jingly sound. I’m becoming like this. A cool pool that pulls on your eyes in a medicine cabinet. I have sometimes shredded a crucial anger, rather than put it to good use. Maybe that’s it. That’s why. Everything around me wants to explain itself. I don’t know why. I knew it as soon as light scattered over the bedspread that there were forces afoot, troubles dribbling calculus and calliopes responding with polymers. Meanwhile, the shapes and colors on the canvas are so unsettling the people have gathered, they’re reaping havoc, they’re doing the hully gully, they're singing an ancient new song, complimenting the propulsion, and squeezing the daylights out of every soufflé.

Once you see a reality, you can’t walk it back. The democratic morality is at it once again with a slogan, a few good adjectives, and a dead skunk. Sour sweet juices squeezed from a faulty cause and effect won’t quench the brushwork of a crazed calligrapher. This is an illiterate, anti-intellectual age, so I have to ask myself, why do I keep twisting my light into a corkscrew? What am I trying to open? What do I hope to achieve? Is this going to start a revolution? Why do I feel like Rip Van Winkle in a stolen Ferrari? By some apparent offkey anomaly, I manage to walk outside toward the emotions fossilized in the local real estate, and meander its many bones and mythologies. It was an ok empire while it lasted. And when it crashed we all felt strangely like a school of aberrations, pilgrims on a bender.

It's crucial to maintain the scenic beauty of one’s autonomy, not to tremble because of what harnesses you, but to deviate into sequins when the circumstances call for a hootenanny. There’s a lot of indigo beneath our words, but until everyone taps these consonants against the metal casing of their oscilloscope, it will remain in chaos. When science fails us, we must rely on swimming to find our inner Algeria. Our sugar is unofficially tough. But what about the clouds drifting around in life during a library? I have such books as I may mull to fill a universe with the lunatic grammar of its own absurdities, and the coolness of something with mint in it, or a pretty deferment. Absence is good because it restores the things that elephants like, such as space, and grass, and loose-fitting homogeneities. I’m all about underwear these days. I like the looseness of certain boxers, and a well-earned lassitude. I began, in old age, to rediscover the advantages, and some of the joy, in movement. And this new knowledge keeps much of our space outdoors, where it may touch the outer bounds of society, and the crack of morning in a dying conviction.

Logic is the cage in which we enshrine our cognitive jewelry. Dump logic, you’ve got something different. You’ve got dirt. There’s no limit to what a lyric can do spinning wildly around a marigold. I think consciousness is mostly paper. But that’s just me. I’m not here to preach, or sing, or rest my head on a table and drool. Talking is what each of us does while slowly chewing the air into tiny nuggets of sound. This, on the other hand, is a pale origami of folded air made reckless by a surplus of alibi. It isn’t propelled by incentive alone. Somewhere in the piano is a scenery cured by pulling on music with contrasting wires. We have to think differently of ourselves by folding our heritage into a conversation. I want you to think of this paragraph as your personal guide to a better delinquency, and so shake hands and part, believing in a better future, and the mutability of mousse.

When texture grabs an eggplant, it doesn’t mean umber, it means guzzle the moonlight. Seize the day. Sneeze the night. Suffer the fools. Squeeze the wind. Sizzle the fritters. Fritter the sizzlers. Nail the mail. Mail the nails. Walk backward into your childhood and bit by bit unlearn everything they pounded into your head. Color within the lines, salute the flag, work hard, obey your parents, trust the authorities and you will shine, because the U.S. is a stunning democracy and a prime example for other nations to the glorious achievements of a free society. This formula seems to work quite good for some people. Others seek elsewhere. The ancient ruins of Blonde on Blonde, Zen calligraphy, the prose and poetry of Charles Bukowski, miniature golf, moist umbrellas, the murmuration of starlings, or the improbable beauty of doorknobs. I sometimes find great solace in the ghostly ephemera of a garden hose. It is through solitude within the nothingness of pure being that the deployment of some inner sanctity builds its house under a waterfall, and forfeits the elegance of the harp for the eloquence of the ukulele.  

Our incongruities are often a triumph. Until I latch on to something beautifully flawed, the feathers will not hold the sky in their nested hypothesis, nor will the flight of swallows offset the hegemony of STEM programs and coding clubs. I find it hard to watch Star Trek. When did technology become a religion? Pain in the face of beauty is the longing for the sublime. Raw natural power. I learned this one day stepping outside my opinions and framing each moment with bones. Poets in a destitute time seek refuge in absence. They reach into the abyss for the ancient name of Being. Every so often a new grammar exhilarates my fingers, and unravels a fresh commotion, a mechanism inside the teeming sand that is hard to identify without a fistful of nouns and something divine gurgling in my head. Everything in the holy beyond begs to wallow in the realm of the unpredictable. This is where it comes alive. And divides into trends. Tear your oddity in two and see what happens. This communion echoes what we’ve all experienced in our dreams. Some people talk like they’re brushing their hair, and some people talk like the fluids sloshing around in a skull during Hamlet’s conversation with a gravedigger. Who’s your favorite Hamlet? Sir Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson, or Divine? This toss of words into the air imitates my first arrival on paper after a long day seeking the right euphemism for superfluous. Is that what we’ve all become? Superfluous? Well then, I give you the superfluous. The world is full of residue and insults. It’s also quite beautiful, in the way all doomed and wonderful things are doomed. Doomed with beauty. Motherhood and halibut and Juneau, Alaska. I adapt from all the cracks in the ice, all those treacherous slopes and good intentions, and give a sneer toward the ultimate. There is no ultimate in the badlands of the penultimate. Hesitancy gives me time. I arrange an injury for whatever my impatience has created. It’s always been like this. Unfettered, chartreuse, and yippee yi yo ki-yay.                                          

At Bottom

Ultimately, what I happily consume is an absence: a proposition that is by no means paradoxical, if one considers that Mallarmé made it the very principle of poetry: "I say: a flower! and... musically rises, the very idea and sweetness, the one absent from all bouquets."

-                                       -  Roland Barthes

 

I like a prose that flows smoothly like a river. There are things you don't notice at first: patterns and agitations that subtly reveal themselves at the surface, boils, eddies, folds, ripples and whirlpools. Mesmerizing undulations. Intriguing fluctuations. If you read the river carefully, like Mark Twain when he was a riverboat pilot, you quickly realize that what appears on the surface – the text - is an important indication of the tremors and perturbations hidden in the depths. Language sublimates emotion. It turns abstract. It provides a critical distancing that permits a deeper intimacy with the thornier nuances of feeling. The drift of our mind touches on anything, on anyone it can quickly mull into a corner and revive, draw it to the surface and explore all those nuances and maddening incompletions that were never fully articulated in the jarring distractions of the moment when it first occurred, and tore you apart, unbuttoned your soul, or made you dilate into an actualization of existence never experienced this intensely, this exquisitely disconcerting. And while the wood crackling in a fire pit warms a universe of yearning and skin, the soul tugs on the pale azure of a cloudless sky whose fine, stratospheric air thins into the cold black void of outer space. I saw a sky like that once above an alkali desert in Nevada and it shook me to the marrow of my bone, and once during a solar eclipse in Yakima when everything went quiet and moon shadows moved in undulating waves over the wheatgrass I realized how thin and tenuous the division between existence and non-existence truly is. Wherever you go, wherever you are, whatever mood, whatever frame of mind, the void is there, glimmering in the spaces between the words, or thawing into the nothingness the words create.

I know the words are working when there’s nothing there to show for it. When everything said and done is kabuki and reality bursts into biology and form, the story you’ve been telling yourself to explain things comes out of a radio and unfurls its pullulations in shrieks and anguish. I get my strength there. I also get it from Kerouac and Proust. Wanda Coleman. Gertrude Stein. It’s painful to watch a language rot and disappear when a culture turns hostile to the vagaries of the mind. People have a tendency to blame the wrong things for their misery. I’ve done my share of bitching. Distorting. Exaggerating. And eventually stumbling over the truth. It feels good to do that. Vent. Ventilate. And underneath it all is sensed the unreality informing all these words and distinctions, the rarefied dimensions that stick to the mind like a magnet to a refrigerator.

The scorpion is our introduction to our hidden self. Like the night I was house-sitting in the Santa Cruz Mountains back in 1974 and watching Elizabeth R starring Glenda Jackson, my bare feet on a wooden floor, when I heard a clickety clickety and looked down to see a scorpion scamper under the couch I was sitting on. It was startling, for sure, but I felt nothing transformative, nothing uncanny. If this was my hidden self’s cue to come out and disclose itself, my hidden self must not have been paying attention. Nothing happened. I think I was at a point in my life where my embarrassments and utterly irrational responses to a world I only half-understood were so thoroughly transparent it was pointless to care about what was private and what was public. I was just me, a man crying to carry the sun. People tend to hide their more authentic versions for a wide variety of reasons, but staying a member of one’s tribe is one of the biggest. Back in the legendary sixties I belonged to a tribe that relished disagreement. Now it’s just the opposite. Everybody’s got their scorpion. And I don’t mean tattoos. I mean those stinging comments one keeps to oneself. Small talk is the substitute for actual conversation. It’s like having a revolver in the glove compartment of your car. You know it’s there. You know what it’s capable of. But you don’t want to wave it around while firing it off randomly. Not if you’re cool, and guiltily relish a life of quiet desperation. Conversations are minefields. And because I’m conversational, I get blown up a lot. I stand there, exploding, while maintaining a smile.

So this, at bottom, is me. Nick Bottom, comedic weaver, and idiot extraordinaire. Making fustian out of total disorder. Trying to make sense of being able to enter a cathedral but not being able to chop down a wind. Don’t ignore the spirit of futility. It’s there for a reason. It’s there to remind you that the pursuit of money is non-refundable. Lavish the context in ambiguity if you plan to bathe your ideas in ink. The sun's wardrobe suggests summer, but it's archaic, and I prefer sequins. It’s when you hit bottom that you realize how high your ambitions went as you stood on the ground watching them burst apart in an apathetic sky. The earth feels good in a sweat lodge. Better than a witness stand. Or jail. The nothing I do is nothing. But this is corduroy, and meant for karaoke, not tweezers. I want a bolo tie with an eyeball and a horizon that gluts my aporia with a forever receding herd of excuses in my rear-view mirror. And I want it to be warm and welcoming when I get there, which is never, and overflowing with red hot vacancy signs.

 

People Who Take To Writing

Life in the 20^th century was all about dials. Radio dials, TV dials, speaker dials, watch dials, clock dials, ovens and washing machines, oscilloscopes and telescopes, there was even a soap called Dial. Dials are easy and unequivocal. It feels good to turn a dial. The control is straightforward. Uncomplicated. Life in the 21^st century is all about touchscreens. It’s slightly less convenient, a little more tentative. Icons and symbols get accidentally touched and things go haywire. Everything suddenly turns complicated. Maddening. It’s harder to control things. There’s always a function for help, but the help arrives in a language that is indecipherable. One’s day gets lost going down one rabbit hole after another. Again: maddening. One feels a loss of control. A creeping obsolescence undermines one’s sense of ease and confidence. One’s sense of relevance.

One wonders: is this due to an erosion in communication skills? A deluded idea that anything in computer technology is inherently superior to analog technology? I think it’s both. Erosions in communication have been massive. The delusions of high-tech border on psychosis. Tech giants that believe they’re gods. That hunger for immortality and transhumanism. That want to rid themselves of their humanity and become androids gifted with superpowers. No wonder life in the 21^st century feels like living in a comic book. Life is continually under attack by supervillains.

Poetry is a lost art. Reading is a lost art. The few, such as myself, that persist in its impoverished domain dream wistfully of a place like the encampment of book lovers at the end of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, which was based on the novel by Ray Bradbury, who despised modern poetry. One wonders what he meant by modern poetry. Ezra Pound? Marianne Moore? T.S. Eliot? Gertrude Stein?

I watch a video hosted by a female, thirty-something literary agent on the topic of her clients being worried about AI written novels taking over the market. It’s hard to sit through the video because the host uses that infantile up-speak for getting her message across. That is, however, the way people in that age group talk now. They don’t sound like Gore Vidal or Malcolm Ex. They don’t sound like Susan Sontag or Doris Lessing or Alice Walker. They sound like they’re kindergartner teachers addressing a class of five-year-olds. I did, however, like her overall message. Concentrate on the quality of the writing. I can’t argue with that. She also encourages writing high quality, prestige writing; difficult and challenging writing, and cites some figures that convincingly argue that there is a market for this kind of writing. It’s in the area of marketing where she disappoints my demand for integrity in writing. Marketing is for marketers, not for authors. Marketing is a special expertise that has little to do with the kind of intense concentration and mental juggling an author must do to create a language that engages the mind and inspires creativity in the reader. Like any selling, there’s a skill and a demeaning aspect to manipulating emotion and generating a superficial excitement based on ludicrous notions of popularity and personality, concepts that are anathema to the creative writer. A lot of publishers have shifted that onerous task onto the authors, which is utterly absurd. People who take to writing often do so because they don’t connect artfully with the public. They’re authentic people intensely uncomfortable with playing roles, especially performances gauged to influence. I find the current trend of influencers on social media to be yet another sign of moral decay.

This also betrays how unrealistic I am. If I’m going to be honest about generating an audience for my writing, I have to concede that figuring out ways to publicize my work is going to bear some importance. If you’re going to raise horses, you have to learn to shovel shit. I just don’t like it.

My wife came home from a local nursery with a hibiscus today. It has bright red flowers and she's completely in love with it. I know the feeling. I get that way whenever I encounter a beautifully crafted paragraph. But that’s too limiting. It isn’t just the craftsmanship of the phrasing and grammar, the way words flow together in an undulating field of meaning, like the green hills of England, or the dazzle of fishing lures mounted above a hamburger grill. That was in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, by Lake Metigoshe, and comprised all the reasons anyone would ever need for the use of an outboard. These are structural qualities, things that turn the mind like a driveshaft. It’s when a body of words scuds across a crowded dance floor without tripping anybody that piques the upper registers of the mind. The words conjure the hully gully, and the ruminations it inspires sparkle like a mirror ball at a Cincinnati rave. It’s never just craftsmanship. Quirks of grammar. Bon mots. It’s when the letters bristle on a wolf, and thrash at the air, that it nears its goal. But it’s when the entire scene vanishes and turns to nothing that it sparks into life, and bites the sun. Writers that can do that amaze me. There are powers in language, and the writers that find them have eyes like Emily Dickinson.

Word processing is an unassuming stool. I say this because the satisfaction of the boomerang arrives with the dyspepsia of the straggler purged by the morning winds of a general tumefaction. From the point of view of common sense, the anvil doesn’t have feelings. But from the point of view of iron, the anvil is livid with syntax. This is because language is held together by moonlight. A sense of interiority alters beside the cardboard, but the arousal of a violin from a cup of tea amazes both the potential for mayhem and the sympathy of strings. This is because language runs on prestidigitation. We often exclaim the very tools that crash the savor of themselves. And this causes a great alternative to hurl itself at our necessities. The nouns with these shapes get them from fencing predicates. The others ride a caboose to the blast sight, and assume the form of clay.