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.
