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.

 

Between Thorns And Pasta

Between thorns and pasta, it seems to me that one of them lies beyond life itself, so quantum is the consummation that visits the soul in the dead of night. Pasta is the buzz we get when the tomato sauce flashes its lights during dinner. This temporary visual blurring is a known side effect of translucence. Furthermore, the surgical procedure itself requires stirrups and poise, as lifting a body of noodles from their entanglement on the plate involves skills whose arithmetic balances presumption with bewilderment. Keep the mouth open and the mind on horseback. A story with a fork in the text caresses the membrane of the brain. This is what poetry is all about: reservoirs of irrepressible basil. Nothing great was ever achieved without basil. Turmeric is more about mental endurance and reaching for things in the back of the cupboard, those moments when a small ladder might come in handy, and step by step phrases designed to elevate our spirit bring us into contact with vegetable broth and cumin, epiphanies canned in tin. We’ve all had those moments when the universe is trying to tell us something, give us a little sage advice. Take time to visit a roadside philosophy. Dare to love God without a lawyer present.

You see, I’m afraid I think this is something that’s happened, something atypical of the way things struggle, when it’s really just denim and exclamation points, invectives hurled at oligarchs, penguins diving into the ocean, the dexterity of peeling an orange. It’s not like I’m trying to underestimate things. I find everything overwhelming. Particularly orchids. Orchids and monkeys. Swinging from vine to vine while filling the air with a bloodcurdling primordial yell. People sometimes ask if I would rather make a horseshoe ring sparks in a frontier stable, or weld the letters of the English alphabet together in configurations capable of speech. You know, like a gate creeping open as a pink elephant exits the lawn of a stately mansion, which is, in actuality, a long pink tongue, flapping up and down in a mouth hectic with verbal expression. I don't know why they ask me these things. I think maybe because they’re drunk. Or I’m drunk. Or that the whole scenario is an invention I've created to fill the time with wine and recitations.

I’m tired of these sophistries, these stabs in the darkness. We’re right there now, right at the commencement of Armageddon. So everyone wanders aimlessly or performs functions robotically, trying to create some motivating sense of purpose out of nothing, gobbling up the monologues of YouTube podcasters, sitting in their cars, weeping, or cursing, because even the myths are gone, there are just questions now, for what, for who, for whatever reason, for no reason, out of sheer momentum, just the blunt reactionary routines of applied physics. The people at the top, at the tippety-tippety top of the multibillionaire stratosphere, are prepared to go underground, and bowl, or sit on patio chairs waving their arms around as they exclaim what geniuses they are, while all the animals and Homo sapiens of earth lie dead and buried in radioactive dirt.

Existence offers us the chance to sew our muslin with the thread of sequence and patch our misfortunes with the breath of euphemism. Make ice cubes in the freezer, macaroons in our dreams. Decisions about what to do how to act what to say where to go when to get ready to be alive shoot bottles on fenceposts wear mohair feed the cat make the bed watch Hard Day’s Night for the umpteenth time hoping to recreate that period of time between 1964 and 1966 when the catastrophes of the future were still manageable but no one paid any attention. Making a lore of one’s existence is a mania. This condition, indeed, demonstrates what a crock any similarity might serve to wheel the cartilage of thought around in a makeshift comparison based on a fantasy of dimes and draft animals. I would urge, instead, the cultivation of thimbles. As if, quite obviously, one’s morning coffee held our conduct at bay, giving us time to collect ourselves, and spend our promptness on balance, rather than contact, until our skin felt the brush of fairies, and the household of language opened its doors to the fourth dimension, and the thrashing of postulation.

 

Hotel Burroughs

Am I trapped in history? Are we all trapped in history? What is meant by history? I can say to the people of the future: I was there when the bombs dropped. I was there when the president went mad. I was there when the sublime crawled into a ballistics calculator to die. I was there when people carried telephones everywhere and rode electrically powered scooters and lived in their cars and set up tents on sidewalks and foreshadowed their own demise. I was there when the sky split in half and Harpo Marx rode out on a bicycle smiling broadly and tooting his horn. I was there when technology became omnipresent and assumed control of everything and killed humanity with meticulous imprecision and rogue military drones with autonomous software shooting indiscriminate targets erased all the elation and skill of killing things. I was there when reality ceased to have any reality and the U.S. Constitution became a quaint antique with no relevance to the whims of billionaires. I was there for the last episode of Breaking Bad and the second season of Landman. I saw western civilization capsized in the Strait of Hormuz and Jim Kerry receive a Cesar award though sadly his fans did not think he was real. And here I am now nursing a macular hole in my left eye and wondering if it’s possible to escape history, defy fate, and live in an alternate reality based on Schrödinger’s wave equations and Balzacian syntax.

Anguish sometimes leads me to the gates of the present. The Power of Now. Concentrating on the precious and inimitable sanctity of a single raison I have inserted into my mouth with an attitude of reverence and awe for what Arundhati Roy calls The God of Small Things. But the present never feels solidly present. The raison is good, wrinkled little thing that it is, it’s a passing, ephemeral moment that leaves a ghostly residue of uncapturable life behind it. The present feels more absent than present. Maybe that’s the point. It’s the absence of the present that nourishes the sublimity and calm of the present moment. The reason the raisin is so delicious is the intense focus that went into recreating its own little power, as if its wrinkly little body contained the mystery of the Big Bang, and tasting it liberated a living shadow of its reality.

Now is now. I mean now. Now and again. And that’s the way the story goes. Goes on and on. And on and on. Sometimes when it seems people are exaggerating they’re really just extending themselves into space. It starts when the music becomes ecstatic. And eccentricity loses conscious awareness and gets real down and dirty. And Molly’s dress flies up and memory loses its memory and hangs like a mammary from the chest of a convict. It is characterized by heedless moisture and dirigibles producing a soft cranium light. Grammar snaps and spills itself in funny ornaments. This is how I splash upon my mood and make it luminous. This is how I pick up a stick of metaphysics and shake it like a staff of bells. It is my way of saying we need to stoke the furnace with dirt and turn it into a garden of fire. And cross the border at the frontier of your life.

50 years ago today I drove a truck with a pint of blood up Cherry Street to Harborview and worried about getting the clutch out in time before I rolled too far back and hit someone. It was a steep street and invited those kinds of concern. I worked for a hospital delivering things. And then I quit and went back to California where I thought I belonged. But I was wrong so I went back to the Northwest and its coffeehouses and gray skies and trolleybuses hooked up to wires and techies skulking around video arcades. If I look back far enough I find examples of myself littered around December, 1963, when I was rapidly metamorphosing into a hippy. I didn’t stop there I became a monster on the air guitar and played to stadiums full of imaginary denim. I learned to fly by the seat of my pants. And then I lost the seat of my pants and went for a swim in the Pacific. Things got real specific after that, and filigreed and crêpe, like a gypsy wedding. If I feel a surge at the beginning of a new pair of shoes I fill with cockatoos and gratitude. Because I know. I know what it’s like to turn the knob on the door of a long-lost friend, and find them gazing out the window. At nothing. At eggnog moons and sultry afternoons in Hyderabad. 

I am not the fog I pretend to be. Everyone tells me I need to take a trip to the limestone quarries of YouTube. It still rocks in 1958. Existence is a seme I lift with a shirt as the people roar and look artfully at themselves in paintings. I will do things in the circus that I won’t do at home. This should explain everything. My car has a carpentry overflowing with scarves for the long trip to roundabout during anesthesia. Once you learn to frame everything obliquely the looks you may get at work will be a little cracked open. The face gazing at you out of its shell may be a reflection of yourself. You can say what you want about swimming in a pool, but I like to take care of thinking with sharp downward blows to the embassy desk. The hotel concierge bears a disturbing resemblance to William S. Burroughs. He takes my cash and gives me a key to room 11. To be or not to be never ceases to amuse me. But I wasn’t expecting this. Robot prostitutes. Black diamond stingrays. A copy of Naked Lunch. A loaded .44. And a mint under the pillow.

Burroughs, you may remember, called language a virus. I take that with a grain of salt. I sprinkle it with walnuts, pecans, almonds and sunflower seeds. I sprinkle it with adjectives, allomorphs, diphthongs, and existential clauses. I circle it with a chain of illocutionary commitments. I pour a hypothetical mood over it. Give me a good word salad and I will give you a surge of conjuration. I will cause things to happen. I will seem unseemly when it seems seamless to seem so. I will comb my hair with a dictionary and cover my groin with an unbridled semiosis. There are leeches within words to cure our postponements. That which is perpendicular will be vertical and that which is hypnotic will be semiotic, like a kebob of poppies, and branch out eternally into an influenza of galaxies and explications. For it is in the nature of language to spread, and substitute one reality for another, which is the reality of words, and is imaginary and vague, and here to entertain us with tricks and illusions, and give us all a sick day to stay home and write sonnets.

I’m here, not only because I can keep going, but because I’m still trying to reach the horizon. Even though I know it lacks reality, it’s the lack of reality that draws me toward it. Some things are like that. They’re full of cork-lined walls and taunting fairies. Other things are less insistent on cereal and yearn for statuary. Their reality is a marmalade of equanimity and pataphysical limousines. Escalators rising to the occasion. Countermeasures artificially massaged by digital cherubs. Words don’t really alter reality they simply season it with lagniappe and sophistry. You can sprinkle a chain with salt but it’s still going to be a chain. Salt will not alter the semantics linking its parts together. The bonds between words are as strong as the will to stand in line for the one checker who appears to be available. Every narrative has its coupons. And every cathedral has its share of ribbed vaults and flying buttresses. I’ve come to the crossroads of authenticity and survival, says a man in a forest of himself. Something deep inside that recreates patterns. That sums things up pretty well. Because after a major commingling of trade secrets near the headwaters of the Amazon, you just want to lie back and absorb the chatter of the forest. Existence is a soft thing, enough to make distinctions between things, and find a good hotel.

Doing Nothing Nothing Doing: A Cri de Coeur

 We live in a time of unbridled lunacy. Thinking is at a climax of latent provocation.

Displaced cormorants dying on the Astoria bridge.

Rickety lies and lethal drones.

Ringside seaside genocide.

There’s a strange and vivid grace to the way a donkey approaches a goldmine. Such a humble creature, imposed with such a vulgar goal. There are currents not always readily apparent to the five conventional senses. But where there is fluidity, there is also grace. Movement is a liquid proposition. The river is its eddies, its contradictions, its idiosyncrasies, its rocks, its reeds, its splashy agitations and buoyant jollity. People float in whatever direction the pompoms punctuate its restitution. Hemp is a lamp of plumes, and is therefore ideal for dashboards and picnics.

I could go on like this all day, blossoming mutant flowers like a pigtail on fire.

And yet there remain enchantments. The surmounting ineffability of the sublime. The savage delicacies of complex systems, rainforests, coral reefs, ant colonies, snowflakes, interactions of water and air. The luxurious milieu of competing russets, schools of grunion off the California coast. The Percé Rock abutting heaven in the gulf of the Saint Lawarence. The bluish undertones of Zambia emeralds. Paracelsus Sylphs. Entities invisible to the empirical eye dilating the mind.

“In such cases, it tends to promote a magical causality—one that posits the necessary intervention of natural factors bearing no logical relation to the matter at hand—thereby disorienting and confounding our habits of thought, yet nonetheless possessing the power to subjugate our minds.” André Breton.

The world suddenly seems epic, volatile, its intimacies gone lunatic, explosive, its considerations freestanding implementations of mass and prickly textures. Nefarious actors geoengineering the sky with sulfur dioxide, aluminum oxide, diamond dust, black carbon. Manufacturing rain. The dark oily rain that fell on Tehran from blowing up oil refineries in Iran. The absurdly heavy rains of Guangdong. Of Maui and Oʻahu and parts of California. The sweet-smelling rain of late August and all its negative ions breaking molecules and chains of linear imposition apart, thereby liberating the engines of rebellion. The weight of utility as opposed to the airiness of fungibility. Explosions of joyful outmaneuvering. Deregulated demeanor. Wildness of innovation, joyful, sexual, uncanny, like Bo Diddley on Ed Sullivan, November, 1955.

And here we are at the edge of the world once again. We’ve been here before. Briefly. But this time it seems both unreal and all too real. It’s eerie business when reality slides off the rails.

There are, of course, signs. There are always signs during times like this. The air is stuffed with omens. Nothing ghostly, nothing cryptic. It’s all in-your-face stuff. Plain as the dopey smile on a garden gnome. Homeless tents everywhere. Deaths of despair. Endless war. Ridiculous rationales. Corruption ubiquitous as mold. Dry rot under the constitution. Rudesby dog walkers. Necromantic narcissist nonchalant knee-length cashmere cardigan Hollywood hypodermic puffy-cheeked Botox baby girls. Aged 60.

The exhaustions. The exhaustions of school. The exhaustions of oxygen. The exhaustions of exhaust. The exhaustions of drama required to argue with a healthcare robot. The exhaustions of pretending to fulfill a purpose, which fell off like a loose muffler ages ago.

The exhaustions of filling out survey after survey after survey.

The exhaustions of taxes. The exhaustions caused by malfeasance. The exhaustions of Googling Dr. Google for a plausible (and benign) explanation of one’s symptoms, but getting scary ones instead, and dropping your tired body on the bed, and dreaming you’re at a party in Villefranche-sur-Mer with the Rolling Stones in May, 1971, having fun until you discover your wallet and passport are missing and you don’t know the first thing about playing a guitar. The exhaustions of passwords. And glassblowing and glaucoma and the stress of family relations. The exhaustions of computers and the internet and trying to find a podcaster who doesn’t bore you with personal details before getting to the clickbait-bombshell-scandal of the day.

The exhaustions of toxic positivity. The exhaustions of downgrades and downsizing and draconian insurance policies.

The exhaustions of dirt after decades of cultivation, its microbial microbiomes destroyed by annual injections of anhydrous ammonia.

Borders closing. Borders opening. Borders crawling from church to church, synagogue to synagogue, mosque to mosque, shrine to shrine, temple to temple, chapel to chapel, looking for this guy they call God. Who, it is said, works in mysterious ways. Whatever that means. Maybe nothing. Borders will be borders. They like to have fun pretending to be something real, something actual, like a fish or a marshmallow. Reminds me of the story of the dog who got so used to the occasional shocks of an electrical fence that when the fence was removed the dog thought it was still there. There was nothing to see. But if you got too near, you got a shock. Or so he thought, poor dog. How could he know the fence was gone? He might’ve seen some unusual activity in the vicinity of the fence. But there was no way to interpret it. The dog had never been part of a work crew. Of course, if you felt unnecessarily hemmed in, as one often does under continuous surveillance, you could test it, test the fence, see if it’s there, that wicked current, see if they forgot to flip a switch and turn it on, it wouldn’t kill you to try, would it? Isn’t that worth a shock? Sometime, maybe. I have to get psyched. Some things are more easily assimilated by avoiding the demons of inquiry. The angelic isn’t always quite so angelic. Rimbaud’s Terrace of Princes, offering a view of the world from a completely open perspective.

Indefatigable prisms redefine the activities of ethereal technologies.

Jungle shamanism.

Ayahuasca eyebrows.

And hit a wall.

Of dumb indifference. Psychopathic apathy. And behind the wall an infantilized population, morbidly obese from toxic, artificial food. Sweeteners like aspartame. Preservatives like butylated hydroxyanisole and butylated hydroxytoluene. Eden dead as a plastic container of gas station jerky.

Dictators are, by nature, against nature. They’re unnatural. They’re monstrosities. And the planet is now in their hands. Their claws. Their tentacles. The drool of their mouths. Sadism in their smiles. The fleshy embrace of their rape.

W.H. Auden famously said poetry makes nothing happen. And therein lies its power. “It survives in the valley of its making.” Meaning its solutions are imaginary. Protozoan. Miscible. Atypical. Intrinsical. Elliptical. Pataphysical. The magnetic magnificence of the cypress leaning into its solicitations, the infinite whirl in the inspired keel of the particular. 

The Art Of Being Null

This heat rising in the throat is a cargo of indignation. I don’t know what else to call it. Words are oscillations that travel through space transferring hair and stepladders. Equanimity is a rash by which a body can determine if it's fictitious or military and is often notorious for its long tongue and fuzzy dirigibles. These are basically lumps of sound by which a sculpture employs its grip on the surrounding air. Yesterday I saw a kangaroo push an intonation through the wall of a drugstore. What I saw was a jaded, pessimistic representation of crocuses canter across a tree stump. This made me feel clumsy. And human. More human than I felt chemically feasible, given the discharge of flak at my feet, and the various eruptions in my thumbnail.

Brutality may be used as a shield against disappointment, but I recommend canals as a superior means of infiltration. Sometimes a local citizen may provide a more personal perspective, and an increase in syrup at the breakfast table, completely incompatible with our goals but otherwise means to a higher purpose than is provided by the martinets on the university faculty. The ghouls are rules. Gaiety has its inclinations and may sometimes include justice, but is more apt to be jerky and disconnected, which is good for our nobler intentions, but bad for the calibrations.

It has been said that the poem explores the tense, often dangerous relationship between the human and the divine, emphasizing the poet's task to mediate between the two. The poet acts as a messenger or priest, crawling over the mountain tops to give birth to divine laws. Or the explorer arriving on the shore of a neglected sensation. One is one or the other in the one that goes to the other, and makes it all shiver, and whirl across a dune. This explains how dice and words get involved in drugs that affect the mind and surrounding foliage. And how combustion serves the engine as the engine serves the ebullience of cherries. There are still a few places where you can order a piroshki and a shot of vodka without drawing undue suspicion. What Mallarmé discovered is that one can also feed on cataclysms and survive the tedium of hell if is one sufficiently embalmed in mayonnaise. If you’re going to take the reins of a poem as it writes itself with the aid of your fingers, it behooves one to fret over vowels and rock hard on the rhythms. Carouse among Luddites. Farm semicolons. Magnetize ghosts. Unlock the precipice.

What does it mean to be null? I know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean collateral. I’m not trying to be a wise guy, but I’ve been around here long enough to know an omelet from a pancake. I know whenever there’s an abyss nearby. You can smell it. It smells of nothing. And that’s what makes it so deadpan. Every time a transgression makes the night tremble, I know there is a strange new color nearby. It only makes sense. If a quantum evening flowers in a book, the world seems more enticing, more disembodied. And I like that. I like being null. Comfortably numb. Not so much indifferent as preternaturally seasoned. Materially unencumbered. From which it follows that to be acquisitive is contrary to the spirit of nullity. And, in many ways, quite personal. Like the pottery scene in Ghost, in which Demi Moore is spinning a wet clay phallus and Swayze joins her as Unchained Melody plays in the background. Life is preoccupation with itself. Infectious names that slice the air into little adventures. That kind of thing. Things like corners. Where you can put a rocking chair. And enjoy the art of being null.

Ask For Ginger

During my early days on the street, I learned a song about ginger. How it grew, how it flourished, how it assuaged osteoarthritis and eased digestive issues. There was a breadth of meaning in it that I could take for a walk. I could talk to the local spirits. I could think about condiments in a time of creosote. I could hesitate at crosswalks and impose my will on the rule of traffic lights. Deep within the Greenland ice sheet, sits an old man lost in thought. I feel in some way responsible for his being there, but reluctant to disturb the mise-en-scène with a superfluous objective. I’ve been told that there is more than one way to achieve sarcasm. One way involves a razor wit and a hellcat tongue, and the other just craves a little inducement, a convenient pretext. Look for a big blue door. Ask for Ginger. If you’re like most romantics, you’ll probably want a fascinating pain to go with your extremism. Find a cause. Veil your tactics with gauze. Be sweet and cajoling to Civil War reenactors. Turn an eye toward Luxembourg. I have 103 reasons to like concision. This is one of them. I found it on the bus. The entire circus of existence. Doing something to a car antenna. And bent down to tie my shoe to get a better look. It’s what romantics do when they’re old and ornery. Too edgy for yacht rock, too arthritic for nirvana. 

The candle teaches a finger the timbre of fire. My sense of abandonment prefers that we speak with sunlight in the dark. I’m not trying to be difficult I’m just trying to be exempt from summary. There will now be a play during oysters. We sparkle, I sparkle, they sparkle as one by one we eventually realize there's no point to it. And this makes it all timpani. We never know what they want do we but we know what we want that gets it done. Not everyone gets to have fun, even though I'm outside praying for the death of hope, which has been the most amusing thing I’ve done all day. Hope turns real solutions into bargain basement gimcrackery. I go about my business with a certain je ne sais quoi. There’s no need for density. We sometimes faint and when I grope around I feel the strangest things trying to establish intimacy with my skin. I like making myself available in ways that some might find strange. Posting things on social media is probably the strangest. They tell the story of what our clouds are like as they drift over the rugged terrain of our existence. I can never find the right metaphor. All the old bromides and platitudes are junkyard curiosities. I go down to the parlor. The realm of the imaginary versus the totalitarian beast. Emily Dickinson sitting in the dark while the winter pounds on her door.

In this kind of situation, where lyric poetry is often more about freestanding furniture, like envy, or telepathy, we save our grocery receipts, and learn to ride the clouds. The plump glow of truth walks a lonely path. An example is when a character in a play reveals their thoughts and innermost feelings, often when alone on stage, and begins to speak frankly and without censorship. You may have already seen a mime pretend to be trapped in an invisible box, using gestures to give the impression that she is pushing against the walls and a ceiling. This is called simulation, and is a way to achieve imperfection. In its free form, it spins like a mood for which the skating rink is a memory, as if water were a form of thought masquerading as blood, passing from one form or the other until it arrives in someone's antenna, humming like Billie Holiday.

Passions are awakened in the carefree joy of dance, and those who have seen such beautiful performances know exactly how much passion depends on the shape of an ankle, or the impressions of bare feet in the sand. Those enthralled by the steely grip of winter feel themselves huddled together, burying their faces behind a spread of fingers. Behind the tarpaulin, if a creaky old romance occurs, I will comb my furniture with a vacation. I am a beginning student of thorny things. This is my device. You are my blackberry. Together, we will make this fulfillment fulfill itself. Among nature and natural phenomena, the natural substance of things is evident, despite a manifest aura suggesting a clear foreshadowing of a fever dream about to unfold, something primal and desperate, something definite and vast, a mountain range or interstellar trajectory, a marble frog denying its inertia, and leaping into Norway. You can feel that tension in almost every sentence. It's a feature of language, a feature of the imaginary. The power to propose, to build a palace out of air, and hold it there just long enough to dazzle the logic of space. 

For The Sake Of Idiosyncrasy

Is what we create truly ours? And by that I mean, did Ed Sullivan get pissed when Bo Diddley sang Bo Diddley instead of Sixteen Tons as agreed upon? Yes, he did. But you have to understand that a divine energy was flowing through him and he had no choice but to defy the tight-lipped stoicism of TV for the sake of idiosyncrasy. Bo Diddley’s rebellion had the stamp of Promethean fire upon it. And a square guitar. Rock has evangelistic underpinnings. And when creative energies flow through the spirit the body moves, expresses itself in ecstatic rhythms, flagstones to the divine. The Gnostics believed that Human beings possess an inner divine spark of light or spirit, which is a portion of the true, transcendent God, trapped in the material body. The purpose of existence is to liberate this trapped divine energy from the corruptions of the material world and appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Or whatever venue seems appropriate at the time. Shindig, Hullabaloo, Where the Action Is. Today I think it’s more apt to be TikTok, or YouTube, or Madison Square Garden or the Showbox in Seattle. Busking in an underground transit system. Or communing privately in the forest, with a paintbrush and watercolors. Evergreens dancing as the wind moves through their branches, and ironweed and cat-claw. Gerunds are the sugar between negligee and dexterity. The weight of  the air on a G string. These are all sound indications of constrained energies breaking free. Jailhouse Rock. Warren Zevon. Werewolves of London. Richard Burbage, as Falstaff. Van Gogh’s insanely yellow sunflowers.

bubbles of potato soup

cannot say what they mean

without bursting

into epiphanies

of sunyata

not to mentionVan Gogh’s potato eaters

i can smell the earth

in its many disclosures

there’s more to a potato

than geniality there are also pom poms

cheerleaders for existence

at the forty-yard line

in the big game of life

which is a metaphor

so stupid I’m tempted to leave it here

until somebody comes along

to kick it into ambiguity 

Adjusting to life in the 21^st century is an odyssey of contradictions. Heidegger’s hammer pounding digital nails. Reality is twelve elves on a bone. Existence explains the stove. But I’ll never understand money. Can you hear it? That clanking of vowels and syllables. I was carried here by a language. Introspection does backflips, like Dylan’s Tarantula. It’s only natural to expect a more open country where you can sit on a hill and feel your intellect dangle from your ganglions like another dimension at the edge of absence. Control is illusory. These words will never be what I want them to be: devices for exerting pressure on demonic impulses. Democracy failed us. But maybe our art will keep our language alive during a time of censorship. At night the metaphors come out and lick my face. They leave scraps of cryptocurrency that only has value in the mind. You can’t write a utopia in a vacuum. But why would you? When something is intangible, it can’t be captured by time, or coopted by a corporate marketing strategy. It’s pure noumena, an aura of expectation.  Chaos is but a shout away, too wild for a haircut, too apodictic for a leash. There are limits. You can only bend reality so far. And it takes a lot of words to do it. But sometimes something breaks. A chunk of wall falls down. And possibilities sprout feathers.

It started as a one-to-one proposal, before it had time to evolve into something more than a bucket of tears. Things that happen in secret inevitably become problematical. That’s why living rooms were invented, and school dances and sepals, some might suggest steeples, others will quietly nod ascent to hamburgers and comets. Me, I’m always on the look for UFOs. What kind of poetry are they writing on the other side of the Milky Way? It was always there, always a brutal reminder of everything that agitated us, excited us, drove us, defined us, and it had to be kept alive before it deteriorated into private equity and deposit slips. Ungodly towers of glass and steel. The banalities of wealth that can only be relieved by sadistic proposals and anonymous tips. Clandestine leverages. Although the annoyance of poverty is generally considered to be a reliable indication of genius and diehard fervent German romanticism, disproportionately large anatomical organs do in some instances apply, depending on context and the temperature of the operating theater. Mathematics are hilariously distorted, and the basilica cradles a superpower. I think we all know what it means to listen to Frank Sinatra during a thunderstorm, but the intense pleasure of terza rima in Dante is brighter than all the lava from Mount Etna, and so is Portofino.

it’s 1030 a.m., a Thursday in February

i’m looking at my intestines

on a computer screen

sinuous, convoluted, Daedalean

that’s me alright

knots of anguish

loosened into oblivion

divine propofol

i’m a big fan of Baudelaire

and this is why

i believe the 21^st century

is a bust and I want my money back

i’m walking out of here

on a carpet of nitrous oxide

and in the future

shall arrange my speech accordingly

what does that mean

it means a lot of things

mainly words

of hemp & irony

like that moment in a hotel

we see a rainbow

trout leap

out of a suitcase 

I think it’s time we start talking about Umwelt. Otherwise, everything in life is everywhere. Scattered. Haggard. Battered. Nothingness is not nothing, because music is perfectly clear about these things. Arpeggios kill depth. Go for a nice long note of Mahler. Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead. He’s in the kitchen preparing a salad. This makes all my emotions happy. The dilemma of daring to go to the marsh by moonlight means something has to happen. It’s a matter of emphasis, not comprehension. If something is incomprehensible it just means it’s obliging our refusal to believe what we see. You can shape a sound with a tuba, but try it sometime with a freshly scrubbed mosquito. Am I overlooking something? The windy splatter of rain on a window. The way water running in a kitchen sink sounds when you’re alone in a house. That sense of regions, zones, zones is a better word, for that which feels simultaneously far and near, and is open to those who can feel it unfold and cue the membrane lining the eye. Who can define what a wilderness is? The French don’t even have a word for it. The crunching of leaves, the breaking of twigs, the sound of its breath. The croaking of frogs. And if you do all this in your head it’s difficult to describe. But if I spin around twice the sugar of it ripples through my nerves. And there’s nothing I can say that will stop what’s coming. It has no reality. Until it gets here.

the hammer is defined by its use

but the nails are chickenpox

and the house is full

of the effusive gestures

of otherworldly beings

how easy it is

to slip away

and listen to the Beach Boys

in a different reality

than this one

don’t worry baby

everything will turn out alright