My Battered Id

My battered id accompanies me wherever I go, sobbing uncontrollably as we plough through our day, denying our impulses for the greater good of society. And although I’m quite fond of reservoirs, I like to keep a sense of universality handy in case my individuality becomes an issue. It’s what we all agree on, isn’t it? The fragrance of panic. The modesty of denial. Lavender is a faith that serves as a thurible for mathematical exercises or for making wishes. Mathematics becomes a faith for those who dwell within it. There is, in all things, a quadratic equation running on merlot. One might sometimes perceive a molecular imbroglio. The atmosphere inside a parallelogram is grasping and muddy. Once, I had faith in mulberries. Now, all I think about are dirigibles. It sometimes happens that, moving through you with unlaced shoes, you feel yourself in opposition to the very essence of the wind. Why am I doing this? Who knows. Questions always sound so baritone, as if the universe were an opera, and a wheel on our grocery cart was broken. They say things happen for a reason. But sometimes they merely happen, and it’s up to us to provide a narrative, a framework with which to impose a law, and a panacea.

My body is not a hero. It has its flaws, its surprises, its limitations, its needs. There have been many instances in which it has been the source of considerable embarrassment. And while many of its shortcomings are exponentially exaggerated in old age, there have been instances in my youth, in those glorious new years of adulthood, that it encumbered my success as a human being with its ludicrous clamor. Like that final exam in linguistics when my digestive system filled the silent classroom with what can only be described as a primordial gurgling, an orchestral malaise that was as far removed from Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar as a two-carat diamond from a gas station hot dog. It has often seemed as if we lead two separate existences. And while, on the one hand, my body has been the source of numerous compensating pleasures, its continuous decline has, of late, been a sobering disclosure of life’s calamitous frailties, and engrossed the aloofness and vanities of the mind with the theatricality of its burdens.

It’s not easy to get enough leverage out of words to lift something unwieldy into place. Mortality, for example. Nobody wants to hear about mortality. The right hardware is needed, and enough subjectivity to withstand a molecular storm of semantic instability. If, in a glimpse of birth, sunlight shines forth from the ink, then that something shall be veins, and those veins will be full of blood, circulating like an expressway. We will see mortality as it churns with attitude. Anyone is never just anyone. Anonymity is a get out of jail free card. There are many here among us who have made peace with their chicanery. Something somewhere is always there ahead of us shaping its perceptions into such conceptual disport that it becomes edifying. What is it to walk through life free of all judgment? It is to dive into a pool to save a friend lying on the bottom. It is to shoot a film in Kodak Ektachrome. Or elude the bite of time with a song and a glass of wine at the end of a Sausalito dock. It’s a particular kind of ability, like churning out a manifesto in a single morning. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it high in the air in a book evincing free will. He who moves to the back of his life as he arrives at the station breathless and frantic to tell about it, is blessed with deputation. It takes a great passion for this kind of thing, and a special kind of indolence to truly appreciate its grandeur. Idleness must always precede work if the concoction is to transcend all idiom and become a truly delicious fetish.

Description is always tricky. It requires an understanding that carves out a space for itself amidst a clamor of words. Otherwise, it sinks like a dead monk in a Danish peat bog. I get religious around electricity. I suggest you step back. Way back. All the way to prehistoric Omsk. What I’m about to describe here may not actually be breathing. Not because it’s dead, but because it’s indescribable. A fat old man stands by the window drinking sack. It’s snowing, and men are going to war. Scenes such as this never end happily. But they do entail a good deal of convolution. The path to narrative dereliction is paved with knickknacks. Therefore, before pulling the trigger, stir the poplars with a few indecisions. Look carefully at your shoes. Are they laced to your satisfaction? Have your nerves been fed tornados of dowager and garlic? Have you seen the orchids of Borneo, or the beautiful cloth napkins of Singapore? Enthusiasm grows into ultimatums if you don’t mellow it with a little equilibrium. Either you find what you're looking for in a language, or you secrete your life out on the periphery, surrounded by candles and facts. 

 

 

On The Outskirts Of Pahrump

This is for anyone puzzled by mirrors, anyone hanging around a glass engine in a pataphysical garage, anyone in a library curled up in a corner where a powerful inner light propels a dazzling exploration of the printed word. Anyone who has felt like a stranger in a strange world, or eaten oysters or slept all day. Picked apples. Bonded with an octopus. Wandered through a busy restaurant kitchen—lost and confused—frantically searching for a bathroom. Or a place to hide from the truth. But don’t get wayward. To embellish upon what is already there is to boil the broccoli too hard. What you want are eyebrows that offer maximum possibilities. A thick long beard and a rubbery disposition. Sometimes, you’ve got to throw life a bone, just in case it takes a cinematic turn. There are tools for repairing fate. You might call fate the engine of the plot, moving everything forward. Some might say closer to the edge. Others might say further from the past. Faraway or near the thunder, you're the reason bones need cartilage. Flexibility is a gift. Trees survive the storm because they can bend. And funeral pyres make really good page turners.

I owe our trembling to that taste you get when you've been left behind. If a feeling erupts, I could be anybody. Over there, on the other side of grumbling, everything is in abundance. It’s just the way things are around here. Heavy, raw, and overflowing. Pool improvements are evident through ingots of light. The sign keeps flashing, but the letters are dim and glow with a sad acknowledgement of mystical absorption. The noumenal comes for its visit each night. You can hear the gerunds sucking and scratching for sustenance. Swimming climbing croaking criticizing pursuing clucking clutching moonshining eating sleeping laughing crying and fucking around. As you can see, a sensual neck possesses many contours. But that’s just Rita Hayworth, sticking her head out of the tent. She’s starring in a movie I’m filming this very instant. If you look hard enough, you can see a camera whispering its attention to the forest. The house of language is alive tonight with the sounds of the Chantels. It’s all about maybe. Peut-être. Quizás. Vielleicht. Malia paha. Maybe grammar is the architecture of a grand silhouette. Something reflected from the other side through the gauze of an imaginary geography. Perhaps someone who has it can do this if they have it to do it with. And then go off and order a drink at the bar across the street. The one with the dim blue light and the letters in the window glowing hot mama red.

This time last year I fished a 92-year-old man out of the blackberries on a steep incline, reassembled his power chair and pushed him home. This year I await eye surgery. A week of piety with my head bowed to allow a gas bubble to mend a macular hole. We’re all experiencing it. This sense of something impending. Of course, something is always impending. It’s written into our DNA. The dread of something catastrophic. The premonition of Mammon laughing grotesquely and loudly at a banquet of fools in a moment of triumph. The emergence of something primal and corybantic that encapsulates everything monstrous about this moment in history. Godzilla rises from the depths of Eliott Bay, lifts a cruise ship from Pier 91 and bites into it like a Baby Ruth candy bar as vacationers in thongs and loud Hawaiian shirts plummet to their deaths in the harsh cold waters of Puget Sound. The image is gauche, absurdly violent, and for that I apologize.  Comparisons are always a little silly. If I compare my nail clippers to a pair of scissors the fusion of the two is a pair of calipers figure-skating in a Tweety Bird cartoon. Is this what a 60-year immersion in Keats has led me to? O for a beaker full of the warm South, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stained mouth; that I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim. We shall discourse, and drink, and walking beyond these words, lie down among some ferns, and dream.  

We can relax now, and watch the mime try to escape from an invisible subjectivity. I can accept the presence of mosquitos if they sparkle like possibility. That’s my thermostat on the wall. It's time someone saw what my next move is about. Imagery is crucial to the exemption of squash. I laugh at the endless highway of remorse. I’ve got Nevada sage in my headlights and asphalt for a muse. We’re on our way, boy. Uncle Sam had a good run. Established some principles, made some good movies, then burned the whole thing down. It’s left me feeling estranged, abstract and intuitive. I have a nerve showing what a little propulsion can do. The lights of Pahrump are coming up. The marvelous never yields to analysis. It goes beyond summary to present a somber knot of abiogenesis. The interrelationships we find in-late-stage capitalism are all the more exquisite for their enduring obsolescence, and their persistent indeterminacy. Each disavowal. Every little cautionary tale. These lopsided confessions. These boots. These reflections. Those stars above the hills. That beautiful flashing neon vacancy sign on the outskirts of Pahrump.

  

Borderline Poetry

Borderline poetry demands a leap. Said Deguy. Sweeter still, he added, is the vantage point of the mind from which one’s wandering is beheld. Amen to that. And what is a borderline poem? I see it as a form too loose and scruffy to be recognizable as a poem, just hints here and there that it means something other than where to invest your time and attention. Something discursive, but quick as a fox. Something fractured but monumentally seminal. A mongrel chlorophyl. A savage inclination. A disconnected milieu. A pilgrimage. An amorphous, embryonic prophecy incubating in the backroom of a louche grammar. Or perhaps something else altogether. Something awkward and raw but with a peculiar elegance bouncing up and down in a kind of prologue. Something with a clear chuckle of dexterity. Fingers busy on piston valves. The pleasures of a threshold. The annoyances of dirty dishes. The pitfalls of miniature golf. The quiet in a music studio seconds before the first note. A pregnant pause. A mind with 300 claws. The birth of a fresh new gestalt. An eye in a bucket of shivered perception, looking from side to side.

Borderline poetry is rude and unschooled. Dim, unnecessarily divergent, and marginal as a lunar commissary for lunatic extraterrestrials. It doesn’t require a license. Poetic license is an encumbering oxymoron. It’s an ox and it’s for morons. The freedom to do anything is paralyzing. You need constraints. Constraints are liberating. Like music. The first time I got in a poem I was listening to Ike and Tina Turner in a beach house near Three Tree Point near Burien, Washington. I just graduated from high school and the future had never felt so huge. So daunting. So dispiriting. So astounding. The music at that moment in time was phenomenal. And most of the people playing it looked like romantics from England’s Regency period. It made quite a good soundtrack for the aberrations of an impulsive youth with subversive tendencies. I’ve been trying to recapture that moment ever since. But it requires brisk salt air, the giddiness of youth, and an inferno to dip your quill in. Ike and Tina Turner were just the tip of the iceberg. It was when I discovered Charles Baudelaire that the door to another dimension opened.

Les fleurs du mal was the first borderline poetry I discovered. It was irreverent and sensual and contrary to the conventional morality of its time, which was recognizably obsessed with wealth and power and industry - just as in the U.S. of the mid-60s and Vietnam - and managing a conformable and passive public. Baudelaire had the heart of a warrior. He was not conformable. Baudelaire was marginalized and scandalized just as any other rebellious spirit, Shelley in England and Hölderlin in Germany. The most rebellious and romantic of the U.S. poets emerged in the 40s and were highly prominent and influential in the 60s, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka and Michael McClure. There were also Anne Waldman who – with Allen Ginsberg, founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado - Ted Joans, Joanne Kyger and Philip Lamantia, who was close in spirit and style to the French surrealists, and whose omnivorous appetite for the exotic and otherworldly found sustenance in Native American spirituality and Catholicism, and whose poetry rumbled and hissed with the ores of the marvelous. Gary Snyder, who was an odd hybrid between a Zen priest and a frontiersman, remains to this day, at age 96, a wise ambassador of ecopoetics. Gregory Corso was perhaps the most determinedly averse to the suffocating routines and compromises of institutionalized careerism. He lived well outside the walls of polite society, pursuing the life of a vagabond and often relying on the support of other writers and admirers to survive.

I found Gregory Corso’s stance the most appealing; he did more than write poetry, he lived it. His life was poetic. His bearing in the world was the stuff of romance and poetry. Institutions such as universities compel a certain conformity to certain standards, in exchange for which many advantages are conferred, such as a salary, which secures stability, and status. This, however, also compels one to live in a cage whose bars are invisible but whose proscriptions are real. Even those with tenure can find themselves without a job if they openly express political concerns contrary to the stated positions of the university in whose employ they enjoy their privileges. Maura Finkelstein at Muhlenberg College – a liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania – became one of the first tenured professors dismissed after posting content on social media critical of Zionism. Sang Hea Kil, a tenured professor at San José State University, is reported as the first tenured faculty member fired from a US public university in connection to pro-Palestinian campus protests. And in the novel Stoner by John Williams, the protagonist – William Stoner, a stoical and highly motivated teacher passionate about literature - is punished in subtle but damaging ways because he refuses to pass an incompetent student. While a work of fiction, I don’t for a minute believe these things don’t happen with alarming frequency.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘borderline’ as a: being in an intermediate position or state; not fully classifiable as one thing or its opposite, i.e. a borderline state between waking and sleeping, or b: not quite up to, typical of, or as severe as what is usual, standard, or expected, i.e. borderline intelligence, borderline hypertension, or c: characterized by psychological instability in several areas (such as interpersonal relations, behavior, and identity) but only with brief or no psychotic episodes.

I’m drawn to intermediate states. Gray zones. Crepuscular fugues. Calamity and prologue. The mystical and the physical. Bardo – the liminal state in Buddhism between death and rebirth. Barzakh in Islaam, the phase between a person’s death and their resurrection. The mesophase in physics in which matter is intermediate between a solid and a liquid, such as block copolymers, materials that can self-assemble into complex mesophases like lamellar (plates, scales, layers that are flat and thin) or hexagonal structures. Archaeopteryx, a raven-sized carnivore featuring a blend of reptilian, dinosaurian, and bird-like traits, such as feathered wings paired with teeth, claws, and a long bony tail, represents an intermediate state between dinosaurs and birds.

My favorite intermediate states are related to human consciousness: hypnopompia and hypnogogia. Hypnopompia is the state of consciousness between sleeping and coming awake and is characterized by a dreamy euphoria in which hallucinatory phenomena freely associate with very little, if any, intervening rationale. Hypnogogia is the same, but occurs as one falls asleep. I frequently enjoy hypnopompic states – it’s a fabulous way to emerge into the world – and have no memory of ever enjoying the same state as I fall asleep. I just fall asleep, quite often with BBC 4 Extra in the background, The Goon Show or Desert Island Discs Revisited.

Reading frequently constitutes an intermediate state between being alert and fully attentive and being elsewhere, floaty, delicate, dreamy and abstract. The effect is exponentiated if I happen to be reading poetry. And if the poetry happens to be borderline poetry, I sublimate into a quivering ethereality of accumulated cumulus and towering, stratospheric speculations, often with negatively charged particles creating a massive electric field that discharges as lightning.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is in many ways borderline. Each poem reads like a lightning-fast, epiphanic burst of insight, each word quivering like a blob of mercury on a flat surface.

Rimbaud’s Illuminations are emphatically borderline. They exist somewhere between chasms of azure and wells of fire.  He alone has keys to this savage side show.

Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger: borderline. The gunslinger shoots metaphysical bullets.

Bob Kaufman’s Blue O’Clock: seven shaking angels revealing our pain.

Borderline poetry is difficult to market. People like to know what it is they’re investing in. They want assurances. Nobody likes feeling insecure. This is especially true of award panels. This insures that anything borderline remains in the wilderness.

We live in a world of taxonomies. Definitions. Categories. Divisions. Ranks. Class. Grade. Grouping. But it’s a false world. It’s a world based on counterfeit assumptions. Authenticity scares the shit out of the rich. It gives them a thrill. Just watch their eyes as they sit at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. I like Oscar Wilde’s brilliant phrase: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The borderline poem, situated at the threshold between a solid, unidimensional signification and a volatile polysemy, resists absorption and materializes a boisterous autonomy. The subjective element is nevertheless maintained as a potential liposuction. Something must be left for the consumer. The greater the effort to participate in the realization of the work and its structural dynamic, the greater the need to lubricate its gears with greasy contingencies. Jean Tinguely’s metamechanics comes to mind, as does disproportion, pink stationary, heavy lifting and vodka. Not just in the sublime, as Kant thought, but in all beauty the author mediates objectivity with a cue stick and lets calculus do the rest. One becomes conscious of own’s own nullity and compensates for it with a foreignness that pokes at things with a long thin feeling. What such an aesthetics does when it finally gets off the ground no one can really say. The privilege of the artist is to see with the work’s own eyes. One might call it a clairvoyance. And is a borderline.

 

What Happens When You Open A Book Of Incongruous Dimensions

 

No trifle is but a trifle but has just as much bearing as a massive outdoor knife lying on the ground under a swaying punching bag and that is my mystification that a thing can be so blunt and immediate and yet so enigmatic God is not what consciousness knows God is what consciousness is before it knows anything at all the natural sphere of what Heidegger termed unshieldedness is the invisible and interior of consciousness slopping around in my head all day I feel a stirring in my inertia I need an antenna to hear your shirt the fabric is so glittery and full of conviction the gold toilet stolen from Blenheim palace has probably been melted down into ingots and rings it makes you wonder what are poets for sometimes everything is nothing but mist kitchen knives bitter regrets I’m in awe of whatever autonomy life affords there are no absolute structures in the cosmos a poem starts out as a story and ends with a spirit of anything goes 

Everything is what it is by relation with another the world that surrounds us is diversified and teeming with life after striking down the demons of capitalism I went to work on a parable about a violin concerto that I chewed with my eyes the devils of analysis sip at the troughs of science most of the time I’m an engine of glass an imbroglio of inalienable curls what I’m doing now can only be described as a form of scrap metal the sky is everyone’s titular destination the lightning has the smell of raw leather not unlike the upholstery in a Nevada brothel celebrating the extraordinary is an effrontery to the blasphemies of wealth that prostitutes everyone and puts our own life out of reach

I solve my problems by walking around in circles until I find a place that has not yet split into subject and object and when that is accomplished I feel oval and shiny and shaped by internal forces I feel lighter I feel inventive and wonderfully subversive contrary as a puncture and easy as a forefinger in Edinburgh pointing at a UFO

Special relativity rests almost entirely on the fact that the laws of physics exist independently of the particular form of those laws it’s the grammar of phenomena in which physics is written the grievances of old age challenge my nerves to sip the wine of dissolution while my craving for music drives the urge to pound the air with my tongue it’s a funny feeling to feel oneself slipping away it’s simultaneously sad and euphoric according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle virtual particles pop in and out of existence ad infinitum the quantum foam of space is a bubbling cauldron of vulvas and bells

10:41 a.m. my stream of thought is briefly interrupted by the thud of footsteps the city crew hasn’t begun the work on the road as yet which is why we had to move our car from our parking lot which will be blocked for an indefinite amount of time we’ve already grown somewhat accustomed to the pandemic of incompetence negligence ignorance hypersensitivity victimhood orgies today’s trending searches on Google brain eating amoeba national parks cloudfare layoffs noaa forecasts northern lights visible across northern united states the northern lights are mentioned in Ezekial in the Old Testament “I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north–an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light” Pentagon begins release of UFO files mom mistakes alligators fighting on her porch for home intruders in Ave Maria, Florida

I remember one summer years ago standing knee-deep in ice cold water near the spray and thunder of Snoqualmie Falls you can’t go there now they’ve blocked it off the park department restricts everyone to a boardwalk you have to crane your neck and study it at an angle as recent as the 90s people could jump from a rock and swim close enough to get a face full of spray this has been the history of the United States it started with barbed wire and quickly escalated to parking tickets and criminalizing poverty I’m fascinated by islands remote places too small to become an empire too warm and pretty to reprove the poor too rocky to become a golf course too cracked and fissured to become a resort

In the end, I opened book of incongruous dimensions like a door and felt meaningful toward anyone I touched it was called Desperado and read like a tarantella of rotating blades the protagonist wore Technicolor cufflinks and had a shadow as long as a Pythagorean tetractys there was an overall sense of dread combined with a soupcon of grenadine settling on the bottom of each page it was based on The Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran but with obvious infusions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance most of it took place in my head since I was reading it while the plot simmered quietly somewhere behind a paragraph and miners panned for gold in the local creek which was fed by an imagination we all share in the quantum field where the emptiness of interstellar space is a buzzing, energetic sea of potentiality I love it I love it all the void the vacuum the improbability of it all shattering common patterns and leaving new ones behind what more could anyone ask there are rivers there are boons and congruities cairns cables habits haiku idioms igloos lamas quantum fluctuations we need nothing ask for nothing nothingness is such a grand propeller my medication can wear it with oysters in the firmament among all the poems singing at its inauguration 

Tristan Tzara's Special Relativity

And so, one day when reality brushed against the sumptuous improbabilities that lie all too inconveniently within reach, the moment one broke free from its coordinates and shook the world out of its trance, we lingered in the barn unfolding our thoughts. I gave a talk on diagnosis as a form of jaywalking, and ways in which to assemble reality with semantic grass. I like the way nouns flow through a feeling making it enigmatic. I’m not sure feelings were intended to have a language. If you heap too many words on a feeling it collapses under the weight and becomes a denouement. Once the plot has been unraveled, we have to invent new problems. And if you throw an emotion into the ocean, it washes ashore thousands of miles into the future where it eventually decays into a tv series. There are too many ifs in life. I can’t keep track. If this happens, that happens, and if that happens, this happens. Would you believe me if I were to tell you I was the original Sam Eliot? I drift through life with the confidence of a mustache.

And one day I sifted through my perceptions and found an elk. It was 1975 and I enlisted in a basement where I could play bas-relief with a human heart. I learned how to cry out like a wolf when the moon was full, and paint heaven with my defiance. If everyone’s a swan, the violin is wisdom, and the pegs are a concern. Remember: Idaho produces roughly 14 billion tons of potatoes per year. This is why, in deep meditation, potatoes are so abundantly palpable. I’ve seen a chair animate the space around it with brilliance, yet it inspired nothing in me but anguish. My look of denim and cotton isn’t entirely by accident. The drainage to my narrative really speeds everything up, and we need to gather the hose at the end of the day and coil it around a retort. Something tighter than invective. Something fragrant, like thought, or corn tortillas.

Tristan Tzara's special relativity states that the speed of language is eucharistic for everyone, while time and space are relative to the amenities linking them to a gypsy festival south of Arles. Nothing surprises me anymore, except earrings. They get bigger and weirder all the time. I think of water, and the fluidity of the incandescent mode through which I walk. I stroll along the waterfront and bend my reflections into confessions. I listen to the pleading whispers of being that emanate from all things in a goldfish bowl. I wonder if the fish are aware of their limitations. And if so, what do they conclude? What philosophies do they weave? What do they make of the many faces in the waiting room that gaze indifferently at the floor? A fuzzy probability cloud snaps into earrings. In physics, this is called the Wave Function Collapse. It means we’re living in a simulation.

Nothing inside a camera sinks into despair. The images are in gestation. As soon as the light hits the silver halide crystals floating in the developer tray, the images assume form and character. Billy the Kid plays croquet by a schoolhouse. A man stands in front of a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, obstructing their progress. My father gives me a hug in front of a North Dakota bakery. Planet Earth, its bottom half hidden in darkness, floats above the moon’s scarred and cratered surface. A man jumps over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, his reflection in the water. Arthur Rimbaud looks sulkily into the eyes of Étienne Carjat, who, in a fit of temper, he will strike with a cane. Some years later, in Ethiopia, Rimbaud will try his own hand at photography. In one, a Harar artisan in a raggedy robe sits at the base of a stone column with a blanket spread before him, selling earthen jugs and plates and bowls. And in another Rimbaud himself, starkly dressed in a white tunic and trousers, stands stiffly in front of a banana tree, his hair cut short in a military style, his arms folded across his chest. He looks stern and determined, gaunt as a Sufi ascetic. He will send the images home. And ask for books on engineering, urban hydraulics and agriculture, mining and naval architecture, The Perfect Locksmith and the Gunsmith’s Guide. 

The main attraction, long and honeycombed, propelled the shy little narrative forward in the deep green volume. Inevitably, things went sideways almost immediately and turned into pyramid schemes. In other words, poetry. Metaphors elusive as sand. Endless as dunes. Fragrant as the alleys of Paris. If I happen to see a concertina I fill with elation and squish it together with my arms, producing a waltz. The world still active in my mind hasn’t existed for 60 years. It’s mostly echoes now, and the soft vocals and bright instrumentation of Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. Discovery is a place of red emotion. If my hunger finds passage, if it perceives the allure of a lunar lucidity, it makes a weird little noise. Some people call them spirits. Some people all them sprites. I call them puff balls. And widen my language to include Thursday. 

 

Process And Tung Tree

I see any proposition advanced in the glaze of a heated moment as a pinch of prodigal air. Because if you encounter an orchard in the middle of a fog, you need a way to talk to it. A lute, or a mantra. We must build an algebra of fingers based on the temperature of the sun. And if there’s a bandage on someone’s knee, we can determine the general attitude of the hotel staff. It is a matter of vital importance to peel it, examine it, and light it up. Which reminds me: the Chilean fire tree by the Methodist church on West Garfield is beginning to bloom. Intensity in a tree is a wonderful thing to behold. Strength is a noble quality, though it is sometimes gnarled and tough with contradictions. Sometimes, indeed—in response to some word that burst forth from God—there would come, in a harsh tone, an insolent retort that shocked everyone. This is why animals avoid the language arts. Those who indulge in its arsenal of elixirs and incantations are called poets, and the lives they lead are wildly impractical, and nastier than antifreeze.

The meaning of this is still in process. I don’t know why this is happening. I’ll have to wait for the meaning of this to help explain why anything is being written. Until then, let’s keep kneading the dough and heating the oven with trepidation. It was my original intent to undermine capitalism and replace it with buffalo. Get naked, and return to our Edenic state. Explore new perceptions, the spiral part of the inner ear, and the history of dice. Wait a minute. I think I heard a door open. I think it’s here now. The meaning. The meaning I’m writing this. It had something to do with transport, both in a literal and a transcendent sense, and why I’m here posing such questions. If I can find the answer to that then I’ll know what this is about. But I’ve already forgotten what it was that brought me here. I know. Imagine The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet. That’s what brought me here, 78 years ago. And I’ve been trying to get back ever since.

I hate to say it, but I think I’m headed in the wrong direction. I see lights ahead, and delicacies and buccaneers. I see Eros in the gold camps and Kavijihvagravasini at all the open mikes. Kavigihvagravasini. Pronounced kah-vee-jih-vuh-gruh-vaa-see-nee. A Hindi word meaning “one who dwells on the tongue of poets.” And that would be Goddess Saraswati. Once again, I have to ask myself, how did I end up here? Mensuration and poetry are falling in love. That would be one reason. Another has to do with capacitance, the ability to store electrical energy, and feed it to an appendage of hungry words. There is sometimes a protuberance from a bone for the attachment of character, which is a distinctive combination of traits, or velvetleaf blueberries. And this gestalt needs constant feeding, or it turns highly unstable and desires food it cannot eat, which makes the appetite stronger and the resistance weaker. And ends up in a bar in downtown Milwaukee gobbling up cashews and listening to the ghost of T.S. Eliot read The Wasteland.

Milwaukee is derived from Algonquin and means gathering place by the waters. The present is composed of the past and is therefore Lethe, doing its utmost to forget while simultaneously lathering it with jojoba and coconut. The effort to forget is the best way to insure that the past has a foundation. Forgetting requires oblivion, not photo albums. In this paper, I urge a scent to grab itself and rise to the ceiling like incense. Because you can talk to odor. It has ears, and smells like dragon’s blood. Come forward, and sing. We celebrate your elegance. We who haunt every word. We who seek solace in stopgaps. In stout nomenclatures and hydrogen jukebox snow. Little Richard. Lucille. The gentle equivocation of a gracious credibility. Independence elevates us, even when the elegies turn dark, and surrounds our raft with eddies of perfect cleavage.

We stitch a puddle, then take a whirlwind tour of the algebra of the situation. You know: the shape of the sandwich, the bristles of the scrub brush, the insects crawling up your back. I’ve been here all day trying to mingle with the locals without drawing too much attention to myself. It’s hard to do if you’re the one putting words together, and making them spin around in people’s minds. The wind sculpted sandstone of places like Utah fascinates me. It represents a level of creative energy that inhabits the zone of the uncontrollable. It’s what I’m after. What I want in my bag of tricks. A gasoline I dry with a phantom towel as I try to manage my escape from control. Let’s hang around and see if any joy comes to visit us. I can feel it in the wind: cold palms and icy fingers. We’re nearing the end now. We’re getting closer. We’ll be getting an answer soon. Will it be the triumph of evil? Will it be the winter of grace? Will the sky crack open revealing all of eternity? I think it’ll be whatever the universe coughs up. They say the beginning of the end is the end of the beginning beginning again. And again and again. I’m not here to argue. Or prophesy. I just had to get it out. Everything. Except my tattoo of mystic wind.

 

The Red Eye To Beatitude

The day is colloidal. Everything floats in suspension. We wander through our intentions while all around us life teems, capers, unfolds and swirls. Diversions make it glitter. My ghost is alive. I can feel it tear the heart out of morning and boil it in veneration. I flourish in its presence. I will broaden my perspectives in the spring. I need every little detail to include a fountain like the one in Saint Sulpice, where Baudelaire was born. My work balloons into a polysemic migration. My perspective gets this big sometimes when it widens and the morning swims through the rain. Why do people like candles? I like wheels. Chacun à son gout. Does anyone have any idea what it means to be photogenic? I find that shamans are, as a rule, more photogenic than investment bankers. And there, on the bookshelf, an amber sparrow cries its secrets. This proves nothing. But it does suggest discharge. A surge of crustaceans, and the giant architecture of Bach.

Anguish puts harm in the mouth. Words are gluttons for utterance. You can never do enough to appease their lust for expression. I butter my conceits with the syntax of heaven. Even that’s not enough. This is a hard time for language. People don’t trust it. It has become a magnet for lies. Poets everywhere in the world are working hard to resuscitate its dreams. You can hear the thunder of something cataclysmic tremble in the air like traffic lights. Horses at a monstrous gallop stampede the distant sky. I feel a vocabulary contort like eels around my tongue. I knew something was off when the 7-11s began to disappear. Right now, I just want to put a cap on this thought and go to bed. My brain is entangled in emails. When it comes to existence, I feel like a tenant. Even worse: a tourist. But this wasn’t the plan. I boarded the wrong plane. The red eye to beatitude. We’re flying over Athens now. I can see the Parthenon. And the lightning of Zeus.

What is the true measure of a nail? Hint: it’s not a hammer. Once you learn to describe a caboose, the front of a train begins to affect a kind of pluck. Anyone who has groped around in the dark with an urgent need to exist, knows the meaning of interaction. It’s not so much I’m against the current administration as I am trying to stay free of its sewage. I think we can all agree that a scurry across the ocean floor is better than a swim in the Sargasso Sea. The differences, as always, are more like the sensitivity of skin than the idiosyncrasies of truffles. Both have beauty, both evince comedy. It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas. Said Paul Cezanne. I couldn’t agree more. No one approved the powder, but somewhere beneath the song, there was to contact to be had with the action committee. At the count of three, I want everyone to verge on feathery brushstrokes. I have a soft, misty feeling that things are about to get wild. And when that happens, I want a sentence near me, so that I can begin another quadrille, and jingle my bells in joy.

I delight in catachresis. I hope you don’t hold it against me. It might leave an indelible trinket. I tremble just to think of it: an entire orchestra of motorcycles. My fingernails, turns out, aren’t as monotonous as I once believed. I have an entire philosophy based on Ireland. Its weather, its people, its shenanigans. I like to find a muscle and rub it with subtlety. It helps me to feel alive, and focus on things kinetic and skittish during croquet. You can’t weigh a thought expecting a troy ounce to whirl into hardware. We all carry a void within ourselves that serves as a reminder that the lightest, most immaterial things in the world, things that are barely things at all, are among some of the heaviest. Mass is overrated. Or is it underrated? I can never tell. Back in the day, we used to say heavy with regard to profound thoughts and perceptions. Heavy, man. Like that. I thought it was a bit of a cliché at the time. But now I think it’s apt. Because I can barely lift it anymore. And when I drop it, it smashes into a million words, and gives me catachresis.

Thoughts once cost a penny. Now they’re worth nothing. Nobody wants them. They clutter the attic. They get tripped over. You can’t even find them at Costco, much less MIT. But here’s a thought: anchoring an idea in sepia is as magically incidental to a rattle as it is to a suffix in Sussex. One is as close-fitting as psychoanalysis, and the other is loose as a goose on a surface of ice. But there’s the deal. The psychology of weight should be celebrated in bed. Don’t you think? The weightiest thought in the world unravels into nothing. And this has as much to do with the right as the left, up with down, mano a mano, mushin or isshin, over under sideways down. And feels good just to let it drift though the mind. Sometimes like a banner. Sometimes like a cloud. And when it rains the air has the fragrance of negative irons, and the dirt turns dark and fertile. 

Howl Of The Hellgrammite

The anarchic cloth bag leaning against the table is because many of my Fauve exercises need a glimpse of Cézanne. Cables, pulleys, adjustable seats. Big mountains. Cylinders, spheres, cones. Ambiguous perspectives. A phantom architecture— what we call the hypothetical—wanders straight ahead and screams into the void. You can walk among a group of people with the sensitivity of a burn victim and still manage to piss someone off. Nerves are on edge, as they say. Everyone looks like they’re circling an emotion, unsure of its wildness and tractability. This is to be expected. The heart is where we take root. The mind is where we flower.

An uprising in algebra can upset a hypothesis, but a marvel in words, a description of hell by a spirit of iron boldness, can empower the making of any incision in the air, out of which plops the future of our tribe. Diagnosis is a ghost of predication. An X-ray's phantom bones. My whisper is nonsense. But navigable as any Géricault, or Corot. These feathers will fuse to a swan if the right force is applied to the grammar of sympathy.    

Snow falls upon a greedy life and says fix this, someone. And so somebody does and it looks like a palace of ice. The reflection of it grows inside the embryo after your strain to live it. We all live behind a face. You either learn to trust it, or at least give it a good haircut. There’s an easel in the corner with a canvas on it. The image of a woman sprawled in folds of space, a face anonymous as silk. There are occasions when the absence of warmth is itself a form of heat. Whatever hangs down, cast it forth; let a wild nature set your invocation ablaze. I’m feeling greedy now, and intriguing, and kerosene. Am I conjugable? I have voice, mood, tense, number, and person. Places to go, things to be, gatherings to attend, moods to pursue, ideas to thrash and parry, doors to open, perceptions to unearth. Invention isn’t easy. Poetry, completely shattered, carries its compulsions with grace. The last time I visited a planetarium I fell asleep. And when I awoke, I was no longer on planet Earth. I don’t know where I was. Europa? The Crab Nebula, maybe. Proxima Centauri, improbable, implausible, but wholly laudable. Which is what I meant to say all along, that poetry isn’t just a planetarium, it’s the whole damn universe.

Age riddles the skin. We become wise, but nobody listens. We become pioneers of the ephemeral, the legendary, and the crepuscular. We become hermits in crowds and philosophers in towels. Our eyebrows go crazy and our umbrellas break. The night walks out of itself then walks back into itself, humming Moon River. And it does this every day, strains to get a hold on things, then lets it go. I believe they call this Japan. Though it might also be a miniature universe, pouring itself all over the bed.

Sometimes you can spot a poem on a page and for whatever reason do a deep dive into it and discover an entire panorama of riddles and complexities and endless associations. I think that’s important, especially now, as the empire collapses, and the first thing to go, as always, is virtue. Eyes look haunted and potentially savage. The streets are full of hungry ghosts. At night, the stars are blocked by the edifice of progress. Various narratives shape its evolution. Most are elegies, but some bite into the big cookie and become tokens of moral appraisal. They become fables, harmonicas, and drifters. Adepts of emphasis. Masters of Kabuki. The narratives are critical to the maintenance of illusion. One in particular, an allegory, takes shape at the heart of a captivating text, amidst so many shades of gray it’s difficult to name any of them with any hope of accuracy. Personhood gets ruminative, and weird. It drifts further and further from the familiar, and ends up in a comic book, making an incision in a sheet of paper as a poem oozes forth, howling like a hellgrammite. The eyes are black. The wings are maroon. It rises. It intrigues. It organizes itself into a chrysalis, and emerges months later in the dazzling hues of crisis.      

 

Ellipsis

I wish you could’ve seen this before it became a sentence. The initial idea, to create an elongated device upon which to rotate an object or to join several parts together using words or remedies that appear to come from another dimension, collapsed under the weight of its terrible ambition and splattered the walls with sanguinity. I need to be more like water. Water readily yields its need for space and chimes graciously with a world of spirals. But how do you make anything mechanical that has the fluidity and circumlocution of wine? One could begin with leather, but that requires death, and coagulation. Transformation is seldom this provisional, and yet a massive extraversion dwells among its gratuities. Everything requires a certain interval in which to service its debts and come to terms with oblivion. Purple is indeed my favorite color. My arm can hold everyone within the parameter of this purport. I feel that the pull on it can become something I can accentuate. Maybe later, when we're in Spain, and the geraniums are thriving.

Let us turn the page now to page 19 of your life and see what’s going on. Pirates have seized the stronghold and sway to the Caribbean rhythms of a long stroll through a nimble advantage. Shine. Shine, my friend. I'm giving you everything. Everything I wanted to give you. Impetus, muscle, and jewelry. My impairment, when it comes to dollars, has been a blessing in disguise. If it weren't for asymmetry, if it weren't for imperfection, if it weren’t for intervening spaces and sloppy conduct, if it weren’t for moles and warts and intellectuals, the universe as we know it could not exist. If matter and antimatter had been perfectly matched at the beginning, the cosmos would consist solely of photons and energy with no stars, or galaxies, or life. My subscription to Wizard Daily would expire, and I would never reach the end of À la recherche du temps perdu, much less its beginning. I would never have had a Banzai Burger at the Red Robin on Eastlake. Or thumbed a ride to Redding in 1974. Or be here now. Blasting to Neptune on a one-way ticket to serendipity.

Popular opinion sometimes signifies that which freely emanates from the moving mass. Which is not often good. What you want is a freely diversified expansion of germination. A place to sit and read and watch the world mull upon nothing as it teems with life. It sometimes occurs to people that they’re not who they thought they were. As one door slams shut, another opens. Rocks slide across the floor of Death Valley in high desert winds. And this becomes a poem. And a big casino. Flashing lights. Ecstasies and lows. People think it’s cute when extraterrestrials do Disco. It’s as if a windlass were built within our DNA and we hoisted anchor when things turned moldy and sour. This led to a search for the soul and a leaning toward exotic literature. Muscles work in harmony with one another, which leads to writing, and hills like white elephants. Symbols full of glide. Dimensions prolonged by pleasure. Orthogonals and paths. There are luminous birds that rise up and create a sense of camaraderie thanks to balloons. And the cost of it is nothing. It has no real existence. Things grow bold in a tumult of words, and there are sometimes new and open perspectives that weren’t there before. Like permission. And cake.

I learn by contraries what is hidden in cans. No one errs in the aspect they consider. Be it fencing, ballroom dancing or watercolor painting, there are, and always will be, a first time for everything. Being wrong. Being right. Being poised and logical. Being chemically imbalanced and full of curiosity. Generalities can be deadly. Said Michel Deguy. Sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, and in an irrefutable and contradictory manner, a pragmatic paradox takes hold, and clicks like a ratchet as it grasps the situation and gives it a nice firm turn. Pragmatism takes a certain pragmatism to be pragmatic. That’s the reality. Now I’ll give you the truth: there’s no such thing as an ellipsis. It’s really just dots, followed by nothing. And that makes it bulge with import. The ellipsis is a deferred existence, a raw openness of universal indeterminacy. A perfect state to be in, if you’re a writer, and it’s spring in Ibiza, and the waitress is coming…  

 

Personal Poem

8:30 a.m. April 21^st I get ready
For my eye appointment my left eye
Has a macular hole when I close
My right eye and focus with my left eye
Heads shrink and distort into Francis Bacon
Portraits. Breakfast is delicious and easy
Bowl of strawberries peaches pineapple
Under a big mound of whipped cream
Toast slathered with Bonne Maman cherry jam
6:00 p.m. I’m looking at tabletop face cradles
For vitrectomy surgery I have to keep my head
Bowed for a full week with 15-minute breaks
Following surgery on my macular hole there’s no
Date for that as yet meanwhile I read Dévotion
A poem by Michel Deguy which begins “Il faut
Que tu sois double pour être toi-même,” “One must
Be double to be oneself,” how do I pull that off
Pray tell I have to go now and blow my nose
Can part of me be someone else looking at myself
Actually, I think that happens a lot
There’s the wacko anomalous me and the sober
Apollyonic me gazing down from the sky
No no no that’s completely bogus there’s
The me me and the other me who’s not here
At the moment he’s at the Deux Magot café in Paris
With his head bowed reading Being and Nothingness
 

 

Northeast Of Spoonville

I did it by ignition. That is to say, by oozing teeth. What I had initially planned to be axiomatic and glass turned into a playhouse. But there was so much noise going through it, that I turned to neon for a better, languidly sedimented hour of argyle. I believe that certain things should be kept immoderate and wild, and that other, more modest attempts at prestidigitation should be congenially spread across the brain. A sorbet that we handle with our eager tongues I write forward into history by the fall of a northerly rain. This solves the bus problem. Thereby hangs a bivalve with multiple hats and a rhetorical helicopter. I can’t help but feel syntactical, and more than a little contiguous. Even though my reading glasses are engorged with Proust, I remain a fork at the dinner table, unbuckled and happy.

I am so there where the paper has consecrated my sad knocking against the door of heaven. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I came here with a purpose. I laughed at everything we said before going to see where the Sticky Willy blasted out of the ground with those tiny hair balls at its base, which isn't exactly why we went to see it, I believe there was something ulterior involved, a stinging evasion of our ultimate immersion in one another. And that’s why I came here. I came here to muse. I came here to stitch all this together in a way that might reveal the smoldering needs behind your eyes. I haven’t seen so many stars since that night in South Dakota, near the Hell Creek Formation where they found Stan, who now stands proudly erect in Abu Dhabi, 5.6 metric tons of Cretaceous bone. We may never see such heavenly folly again, not to mention the tightness of your jeans.

The upheaval that makes words move towards a liberation of such occasion is the sweat of angels. This provides the traction to cross any chasm or drive any forklift you wish to bring the disaster of civilization to light. I'm here for the geometry, yes, but also for a good dose of temperament. I like being famously anonymous. I like flirting with paradox. There is nothing that can’t be illumined by darkness or known by a lustrous unknowing. We seem what we seem to seem while seeming to seem semiotic. This floats beneath my construction, but it appeals to my conception of anomalous dispersion. I’m often reminded of that poem by William Carlos Williams about the broken glass in back of a hospital. Particularly the music of mosaic as it adorns a man’s lapel. I like drama. I like cats and upholstery. The grenadine is for Edith Sitwell. And the climate surrounding our knees is to embolden our play in a Quantum Orchard whose fruit exudes the charm of taillights.

We are next to me in an imaginary place. The melody of your maneuver while reading this makes us remember ourselves for a moment, and what we came here for, which is even now beginning to boil. There's something about what a handful of words can do that gives me a rather ecumenical feeling. It’s often what goes through your mind while you're waiting for something that blows you into a reverie of what it means to attain a state of well-being. Because your life becomes parenthetical. You’re sandwiched, temporarily, between all the monkey trees and stucco that brought you to this moment. The break-ups. The disappointments. The triumphs. The coups de grâce. The banquets. The feasts. The broken furniture. The stupid dances in Elizabethan garb at two in the morning. The slow boil of fascism. The cracks in the wall caused by a Tyrannosaurus rex tapdancing on your brain. Arthur Rimbaud showing you how to prepare a caravan. Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Paul McCartney sheering sheep. Miles Davis ripping the air into diamonds.

That moment when you openly admit to yourself there’s something pressing down on your mind. And it ain’t mosquitoes.

I owe a debt to agates and tar, to those things that dispose us to piquancy and blinking. My warmer voice speaks to a bitter time that joins this diffusion in chamomile and makes it palatable, if not seismic in its unadorned angularity. Whatever I intended to hoe in the beginning has blossomed into vulvae. I can’t say how, I can’t say where, but the binoculars have gone missing, and the glove compartment is a mess. I believe the piano may exercise its opinions with a more affirmative breath if we allow it to breed in silence. Those who spy a concordance may not be wrong about snow. It falls to the earth in patterns that abstract our literature with rust. Personalities just mean the House of Hardcore has a future. The real is always shifted a bit to the northeast of Spoonville. It’s what gives Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger its bullets and aim. That ontology of spirit we sometimes find in popcorn, an exuberance so soulful it takes a sewing machine to survive its proverbs, and a reliable needle to broadcast its thread. 

But we know. We know what antennas are. We know what hammers do. All it takes is a little credulity, some balsamic hardware and a little common sense to make a possibility happen to itself. What makes the possible possible isn’t falconry or applejack or the quiet morphogenesis of a wedding rehearsal as it journeys into the brawn of implacable decisions, the weight of which will generate its own necessary rebellions, and find its expression in the muezzins of Marrakech.  What makes the possible possible is the charade of the impossible. It is the kindness and attention we bring to the world that allows us to hear the ants as they whisper with pheromones in their subterranean galleries, the local foundry expressing itself in shadows, the chemistry of histogenesis flowing through the veins of the monarch as it generates its wings. A meaning remembered by undulation may cause a fever, whereas the birth of a gypsy banana tells the story of how to produce a sky-blue shirt, and leaves the body in a state of repose, unbuttoned and warm.  

 

The Untraceable Transference Between Suffering And Art

Michel Deguy writes of the untraceable transference between suffering and art. I think there’s something to be said for drifting. The feeling of it exhibits mint. The evident urgency in the shape of a mouth. This is my beginning it’s written in Cubism. I’m fluent in the art of getting behind things. And letting them swim in their polemics. I don’t know what kaolin is, exactly, but I can feel it sometimes, unfolding itself into a pizza. The placebo is gratuitous. This is my area of expertise. Is anyone here to watch my feeling wander? Is there somewhere where your hat will feel more salient? I can sometimes feel something crawling up my arm. I look, and find that it’s a beam of light, a tentacle of the afternoon sun awakening my tangibility. Everything has been so brash today. I believe it’s due to the monster in the garden, surfing the Adam and Eve birdbath.

The older I get, the more religious I get. It’s only natural. Sometimes nothing can be everything. I stand by my words, rolling a big metaphor into the oven. Similes go good with incense. But this isn't incense. This is flagrant thought. A page of testimony the words refuse to embrace. Life gets sloppy in old age. When words rebel, the best thing to do is to grab them like a bouquet and give them to a touch of aspersion. I will not block the ambush. Not if I’m flourishing, and sitting on a block of enlistment. This is how I sift through the strain of living and find a nugget of cotton. Emily sat down beside herself, and wept. With laughter. Nobody dreamed time travel would be so indigo. I interact with just enough ambiguity to make it constructive, and then I sit down to read a book on the topic of skin. Videos are ok. But I find books far more touching.

Everything seethes like a fugue on Rue Mouffetard, opening the ruby eye of a gypsy's kite. Meanwhile, here in the L'Hôtel du Vaurien the sideboard needs repairing. It is rumored that Rimbaud wrote a poem on it, and the letters burned into the wood, after the sheet of paper he was writing it on burst into flames. The poem is still readable, but it hurts to read it. Hurts in a good way. Is someone drifting toward this shoal? I feel a shadow emerge from the egg of a phantom barracuda. The temptation to collude with the absurdity of existence feels like a pulse in the wrist of a cynosure. Once it enters the bloodstream, it's hard to get away from it. You break down. You relent. You give yourself over to a force far greater than yourself. Which is called language. And is a serious abstraction, like track-and-field. Or leading a caravan over an Ethiopian desert.

There's a trick to determining whether something is real or not. You let it prowl around in your mind long enough to determine its weight and depth, and if it entices further thought with the hope of a definitive conclusion always dangling a little out of reach, it is most likely a piece of fiction. That said, fiction is frequently teeming with insights that bear the weight of ambiguity.  They will bedazzle a jury with the grayness of a fading morality. The truth nearly dies, verisimilitude bathes in uncertainty, and the judge is in a stupor. The law trembles with its own brushwork. And there it is, the framework of a negotiable reality. Hot air balloons drift over Albuquerque, and by evening we have a greenhouse with veins running through panels of bulging glass. Nitrogen stirs in the dirt and the fourth dimension drips with succulent euphorbia.

I never cheat at division. I divide things unevenly, this is true, but I do it with a nod toward the grammar of the situation, and touch the watermelon for luck. I’m wearing a green sweater. But I have plans to upholster my lips with a riotous hayrick in June. I’m all about sonnets these days, and garnishment and immaterial details. Do you understand the principle behind clapboard? Hint: it’s got nothing to do with clapping. Somebody told me I smell like lightning. There’s a reason for that. I still have a poem by Philip Lamantia cooking inside, teeming with innocence and airplanes. Innocence in a world this corrupt is a threat. It’s subversive. And deviant and hilly. Think of it: the Beatles playing at the Star Club on Grosse Freiheit in Hamburg, circa 1962. Or a war on war. Or a pilgrimage to the land of nonchalance. The noise of silence in a blatant spree of fuzz. A patch of snow with the blue of a neon sign glowing on it is anyone's guess. I thought that now might be a good time to bring it up. The question of romance. The heart of the situation. La raison d'être. Life. Meaning. Purpose. The lingering smell of sawdust after sawing a piece of grammar out of the air. And building a shamrock with a shank of syntax and a soft lament.

So: what kind of suffering are we talking about here. It’s the kind of topic you sneak up on, approach slowly, with poise and grace, and whatever stealth you can bring to the table. And tea. Tea goes without saying. Tea is essential. Any talk of pain is to be mitigated by whatever means. The wonder of it is its audacity, sharp as the blade of a knife, strong as Danish butter. Art, I mean. The forms it takes in prehistory, in caves, and the forms it assumes on Tik Tok. You tell me: which is better? An Earl Gray flavored with bergamot, a smoky lapsang souchong, or a mug of sencha? It tea fails, we have opium, heroin, stethoscopes, online dating, charming rascals, heavenly imagery, ludicrous perceptions, terrible metaphors, silk parachutes, and Billie Holiday on tap. This is a place of voluptuous pleasures. This is where we address the issue of pain. And kick it down the street. A little sleep can help mollify a sting. But it won’t replace the exquisite pain of an unmanageable beauty.  

Anyone adrift must know what it's like to move toward a future of scorched ideals. It isn’t long before a sense of futility bends to the dynamic of the situation, which is clearly birds. Has anyone ever yelled at you to get out? That’s not what this is about, in case you were wondering. No, this is about argyle. It’s like arguing with a flute. You can’t fight it with a banjo. You’ll have to use an oboe. It’ll keep you on your toes. Try writing a poem of devotion. While racing down the streets of Pamplona with a bull in pursuit. If you’re so inclined, I give you Lorca: At the forge the gypsies cry and then scream, the wind watches watches, the wind watches the Moon. Why so many watches? Because in Spanish it’s mira, mira. El viento mira a la Luna. The marvelous isn’t shy. But it is rare. Therefore, we should hustle the raw fact of our feeling as if it were coins of fire, and spend it on ice cream.

 

My Life As A Ghost

I learned to swim in Wisconsin. It was the 50s, and everything glittered under the rigid guise of a false prosperity. It’s a lot different now. Nothing glitters. The United States, grinning ear to ear like a Times Square con man, has walked away with everyone’s dream. And left us with a simulacrum. Freedom on a layaway plan extending endlessly into a nonexistent settlement. Eternity in a can. Why does deviancy so often feel like salvation? Is this wrong? Hallucinations aren’t dreams, they’re more like destinations. The 60s is a lonely place to be in 2026.  Regrets prowl the parameters, taunting us with scruples, blasting us with salutes. Have you ever tried bending a spoon with your mind? I tried it once, and it turned into a fork.  

Clouds are structural: the variables they elicit are round. Therefore, never count your mittens before they linger. If I crashed through a mirror, would I enter the domain of my other self? Or would I find myself looking back at myself with the same lost look? Splotches and blots always have something intriguing in their disarray. I’ve learned to respect the accidental. Anything inscrutable, yet obvious as a mouth. When I think of structure, I think of a pitcher and bowl on a North Dakota farm. I think of the silhouette, at sunset, of a deserted house. A sad image. One of the saddest. And I never got the real story. Where those people went.

I flourish most when I’m doing the least. The rest of the time, I diversify. I like the anonymity of the savannah. It’s where I can walk with cheetahs to the beginning of existence. This is the stepladder at its incidental best. I rise, and touch the ceiling with my brush, trailing the off-white chatter of cherubs. Such are my diversions. Here’s my idea of a paradigm: we build muscle together, we slather together. And by studying the subtleties of linen, I can warm my words in their hypothesis. 

The rattlesnake redefines wildness each time it coils and flickers its tongue. I remember when poetry mimicked the imposition of life with a clash of cymbals. And people politely listened, as they do now, but it’s different, and considerate, and nobody understands my hill. Outside the resistance, the harmonica is a romance. Inside, where it counts, the harmonica is sly, and cognac, and opens like an umbrella. Which is supposed to be bad luck. But I don’t think so. I love umbrellas, they’re like portable houses. And in defiance of rain, I learn to love the rain.

Feeling what I feel about aluminum, I have to ask: what has robbed us of our falsetto? What’s happened, indeed, to the entire chorus? Did you know the Supreme Court is across the street from the Folger Shakespeare Library? I don’t know whether to think of that as a latent defect, or just plain ironic. I see a voyeur that sees me. Sometimes I spy on my own life. Just because your feathers are a little ruffled, it doesn’t mean you can’t fly. Today’s question was: what have you noticed recently? There’s light in the bedroom in late afternoon. The Cascades are eerily bald. And I’m a lot clumsier than normal. Maybe because I do everything now at the speed of sleep. And when I put down in writing everything that bounces around in my head, the feelings I get about cardboard get really French. I’ll say this: consciousness is never monotonous. It’s not the same as holding meat over a fire. It’s more like feeling haunted by the ghost of yourself.

 

The Struggle Inside

Iconostasis. What’s that? Windows to heaven. Icons in an orthodox church. Mirabilas.  Apocalypse. Metropolis. Hippopotamus. These, too. These produce images. And images have questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? I don’t know about you, but I’m buying a ticket to paradise. Wherever that is. I think it’s one of those things that only exist in poetry. Meaning women in bodice skirts, white linen blouse, embroidered aprons, and black leather shoes doing the Hambo. James Joyce sipping oolong in Trieste. Epiretinal membrane, a thin, translucent layer of fibrous tissue or scar tissue that forms on the inner surface of the retina. Here’s looking at you, kid. Sometimes, I seem to be living in the past. There is some validity to this, if we may be permitted to include memory in our pataphysical toolkit. When desire goes unsatisfied yet maintains a sturdy intensity, it begins a mode of seduction. Which rarely, if ever, goes well. Not a good optic, as they say. It’s always the heated and awkward poems that end up back in the barn, transmitting elegies in long bellowing moos. The wilder ones jump the fence and take off for the prairie. And end up passed out on the floor at an open mike in Larame.

Translation is an art. Spin a pumpkin, get a fjord. That sounds corny, but I mean it. The very air has grown taut. There’s a poem in it. I just have to find it. I can smell it. It’s giving off an odor of popcorn mingled with Arthur Shchopenhauer. There has just a been trauma. Humanity has taken its mask off. It’s a total mess. What happened to the eyes? The expression looks so utterly sad with a tinge of narcissism. Its expression is flagrant, and yet timidly immaterial. The explanation is a reverie regarding a hiatus overlooking the anatomies of some modern specimens, specifically one with the teeth of a saw, and the other with a banana-shaped chest and a head like a forest of blurry animals. The texture is rough, like a bad joke at a Hungarian wedding. It takes a lot of motion to make any frame contemporary. And brother, this joint has gone nuts. Zombies on scooters. Academies of ache. Odysseys of ohm. Electrical resistance. Poetical nonexistence.

Sometimes the best solution is to plunge right ahead into the conjectural universe. I despise the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist.’ It shuts down conversations. It shuts down speculation. We live in a speculative universe. The narrative is old and beyond my comprehension. It burst out of nothingness, like a pair of old work boots tumbling out of a closet. A holy ghost in the pocket of a wool coat. Planets colliding with comets. Ideologies colliding with reality. There is nothing linear about it. It’s 100% nonsense. Nonlinear as a Moroccan goat in an argan tree. Human voices male and female singing Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus in a Gothic cathedral. Everything is a sunset sandwich served on a platter of snow. Meaningful as a slap to the face. Silly as a translation of a reclining figure in a state of lassitude. And twice as redemptive.

What is at issue is what causes change. The struggle inside. The contest. With yourself. I’m always running a few steps ahead of my ego. The ego is an egg of remorse. The id is hid in a lid of Bonne Maman cherry jam. An officer of the law flickering inside a prostitute. No longer things, but what happens between things. Liberation is a libation of the spirit. But does it truly exist? Nothing exists with total autonomy. How could it? Only poetry can do that. Especially when it cracks its worrying eggshell head apart and supplies the world with its magic string and troubadours. What, at root, is the reality contemporary to us is hazy as the hazard we can’t see until it gets here. It’s always like that now, crazy and unpredictable. An ongoing dissociation of chilly euphemisms. The inviolate crust of a nitroglycerin thought. To each his natural own. It takes a lot of language to produce a raspberry. A real raspberry. With a justifiable handlebar and a nebular milieu. The deafening cheers as the wrestlers enter the ring. And the words are put in place. What we’re talking about. What we are after. And for which we are instrumental.

 

The Forever Dark Of Whatever It Is

One of the strangest characteristics of my life has been a tendency to do things that serve no purpose whatsoever. Poetry, for example. Poetry can’t provide fuel for the engines of transport and industry, make spackle to fill a crack or smooth a rough surface on drywall, mint money, power a boat, defend the innocent, prosecute the guilty, teach judo, manufacture socks, shine shoes, hold en electrical charge or resuscitate a heart. Poetry does nothing, and it does it really well. Its closest approximation toward a practical application is drugs, chiefly those of a psychedelic nature. It’s not really great at alleviating physical pain. It can be applied with some notable success in the area of mental and emotional pain. It shares a great deal with its far more successful cousin, music. Music excites the emotions. Poetry excites the intellect. Most people prefer to excite their emotions. Only a few give a shit about intellect. Why would they? What has intellect ever done? If you want to see what people think of intellect, bring up Spinoza at a union meeting or a drilling crew on the Texas plains. Why Spinoza? I don’t know. How about somebody more homegrown, like Thoreau. He made pencils. And grew beans. Suffice it to say, that when it comes to achieving nothing in the realm of the pragmatic, poetry is supreme. And this is useful in ways that elude the one-dimensional. The literal. The down-to-earth. The empiricists. The doers. The logicians. The rationalists. The realists. The skilled. The proficient. The competent. The well-adjusted. The masterful. The able. The accomplished.

That said, I would argue that phenomena that purportedly does nothing, does everything. It drills the air with spirals of inquiry and lets the sap of correspondence fill buckets of amber rhetoric. It conjugates the raw and incorporates the incorporeal in postulates of bone. It animates thought and stimulates the bees of the invisible to pollinate the mind. It finds beauty in squalor and music in appetite. It feeds on darkness and gives a habitation to the dead. It does this by doing nothing. Because without the weight of machinery, without the burden of intent, the spirit finds its joy. The cage opens. The panther stops its pacing, and plunges into the world.

Poetry, which revels in enigma, in the synergy of the indeterminate, in the energy of despair, thrusts us into the very heart of existence.

Put a symphony on the turntable and this will happen: restitution, illumination, and grace. Put a book on the turntable and this will happen: nothing. But put your eyes on a sentence and watch what happens: the words will carry your attention to the very end. The end of the sentence. If you lean forward a little, you’ll see where it was leading. A deep abyss. The air is warm and smells of sulfur. Breathe it in and you’ll have visions. The gods will communicate with you. You will write it down and try to get it published. When you’re feeling a little more sober. And a nice hot shower has restored your nerves to a glassy quiescence.

Choice takes initiative. Sometimes we call it prediction. Sometimes we call it weighing our pros and cons. Take a look around. The surrounding force, present on a plateau, requires no authority to breathe. It’s telling you something. It’s telling you to decide. The scales on which I base my work are highly sensitive. They’re capable of measuring masses as small as one yoctogram, which is equivalent to the mass of a single proton. These devices utilize undulating vibrations, where the tissues are flaccid and withered. A piece of time sits beside itself with brilliance. A kangaroo hops by. Turn your gaze toward what lies just above. The reel is real. I know what it looks like. It unwinds in images on a screen. People travel through a beam of light. They refine themselves beyond your reach. And the resilience we have highlighted in their favor pulls us out of ourselves. We walk into our future hoping the decisions we made are there to greet us, shabby, tattered, dirty, doesn’t matter, they were our decisions. We must honor them. Or ignore them. And buy a ticket to Rio.

I wonder who, today, maybe just minutes ago, stepped out of a bar and decided to become a poet. A hearty specimen of humanity like Gary Snyder, or an uncannily sensitive woman with eyes the color of sherry, standing in a garden of buttercups and heliotrope. Or were you born near an open-pit iron mine in Minnesota and became Bob Dylan. I can’t imagine being 18 at this moment and discovering Charles Baudelaire. Architect of my fairylands, I made – according to my will – under a tunnel of gems – a docile ocean drift. I heard a loud, percussive noise. And the sky dropped its shadows on the sad numb world. Decadence is a gift, and it comes in many forms. Hungry ghosts follow its earthy scent. What appealed to me was simple. The ability to find beauty in squalor is a terrible and wonderful power. There are pearls that allow our inner being to hold the sky like a bowl. Even when we’re standing in shit. Listening to the gossip of the stars. It’s a serious narcotic. There’s a science to it, and it’s maddeningly unscientific. There are no diplomas for what amounts to a trance. Just a push from behind. And a flair for parables.

Why should there be one time you have to be more happy, or miserable, than at any other. Sometimes it’s just a matter of standing around waiting for things to happen. Emotions shade in and out with nothing to anchor them. There is, supposedly, a guardian spirit watching over us. I stood once in a cave looking at Ice Age art and it felt fulgent and fundamental. I could feel the presence of something primal. The pull to commitment. And the dive into what that means. Whether something is real or conjectural is a failure to realize the relations between all givens. And so I crawled back out and got a sandwich and a glass of beer. Everything is personal. Even kelp. It doesn’t always need eyes. Just a repertoire, and a fireside. Reality is always a burden because it sets limits. There’s no limit to intimacy. Which is what makes it so dangerous. Follow a strand of thread Sumerian red. The next step down is critical. This is the forever dark of whatever it is makes the sun roll off the tip of your tongue, and plunge ahead into whatever conjectural universe fills the heart to overflowing with ermine and toadstools and stars.

 

Meatus Of Votive Syllables

I can’t remember all the faces, but I do remember the torments. Meatus of votive syllables. Line by Michel Deguy. That I remember. It’s so eminently chewable. Full of protein. Baroque as a vessel for burning incense. Tribute to Jack Johnson by Miles Davis. I want to write a review of my favorite river. Mark Twain already covered the Mississippi. That leaves me with 187 major rivers globally. This will be long and ongoing project. It will be like a river. Maybe my favorite river. I’m leaving now I can already feel the tug of the current pulling me into another embankment. Another repercussion. Another ceremony. Another house. Another rising sun.

I’ve never been to Japan. It’s on my bucket list. So is Budapest. It’s in the title of one of my books. I feel irresponsible for using it in a book title since I’ve never been there. It seems fraudulent. So it’s on my list. Budapest. Which always makes me think of Buddha being pestered. Or Buddha himself being a pest. Imagine somebody being pestered by the Buddha. I think that may be the underlying reason I used it in a book title. So Budapest is on my bucket list. And so is Buddha. And building a time machine. I want to hear Rimbaud read The Drunken Boat on Rue Férou. I’ll bring Buddha along. If we’re lucky we’ll get pestered by Rimbaud. Why does denim look so cool when it’s torn? I’ve spent my entire life in denim. I’m wearing denim right now. Denim pants. Denim shirt. Denim eyeballs. Denim skin. Denim hair. Denim Buddha. Denim impertinence. Denim riddle. Denim nickel. Denim devotion. Denim motion. Denim emotion. Denim ocean. And when the tide ebbs I’m left naked. Staring at the stars.

I like socks. But I’d prefer not to talk about them just now. If you don’t mind, I’ll just drift along dreaming of walking barefoot on the sands of Carmel, July, 1965. Some guy on the beach playing a guitar. Iconic image. Ironic spinach. Laconic mnemonic. On another occasion, I started a revolution, based on evolution, endless postponements, and bold exaggerations. Solomon Burke drove me around town. Inglewood. He told me there’s a diamond in the mind. I said thank you, thank you for leading me to be something more than a frankfurter. Our lives change so gently we often don’t see the result until we’re 79, gazing out of the window of a hearse. Every time we cast off from the bank, I lose my balance a little. It’s only natural. It’s the frequent disassociations that cheer my interactions. Invisible strains of DNA ripple around our contact. Let me roll it to you. You should be feeling a current by now. It not, I have failed. Failed to enthrall you. Here: take this sentence and give it a home. Feed it poetry. Clap your hands. Spit and repeat. We’ll get there. We’ll get there alright. I’m not even writing this. It’s writing me.

Bo Diddley’s rhythm is a variation of the Afro-Cuban son clave. I lean toward anonymity. This is the rhythm of the broadloom. The painful yet strangely jubilant results of an uncompromising stance. À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Just writing this causes me to disappear. I sit here ripping thoughts out of the air. But I don’t want to think them. They’ve already been thought. Therefore, they stink. It’s not what I’ve been seeking. It’s not the shelter I was hoping for. Those vagaries of the mind that provide some inkling of elsewhere, the flickering lights and shadows of a foundry between the knee and ankle, the alluring mysteries of negligee, the salty brevity of ocean spray, the penultimate unfolding of the afternoon, the jolly self-deprecations of office blandishments. The asylum of words. The diesel of distraction. The intricate defense of filigree. The immoderacy of music. The haunting voice of Hope Sandoval. The final squeak of an unhinged door. The chuckling cluck of a cockatoo. A dodecasyllabic synopsis clicking across the floor.