Gritty Scintillas

Gravity is not enough to describe the female breast. You need allegories and chocolate. You need heat. You need warmth. You need softness and silk. Hot inseams. It’s often hard to tell what constitutes experiential differentiations of reality. There are those who hold small electric motors in the inner sanctum of their throat, knowing what a long ordeal it is to twang a 12-string guitar fifty fathoms deep in an invocation to mulberry. It isn’t long before we discover just how awesome it is to embody an abstraction that extends from the brain all the way to West 53^rd street in Midtown Manhattan. Hard work begins with a sputter of alabaster, and a tiny jerk on the syllable string. I polish my details among dangled theories of incandescent media, expecting a Guggenheim. But the joke is on me. We often cross the parable of ourselves when we’re least aware of it. And what we produce is words, inglenooks of infinite fable, and the grandeur of any given bean on a winter's night. It’s not a matter of what happens, but how what happens, & why. It’s a good life once you get the hang of it. The splashing of shadows awakens the amenities, the things no one expected. Like the smoothness of skin.

And let’s not forget ice cream. Or Edith Piaf. Non. Je ne regrette rien. Except all the hurt and disappointment I left in my wake. There are some things no amount of ice cream, or bourbon, can alter for one’s betterment. I grew up in a house of music. In Minneapolis, I learned that cutting through the winter frost is a privilege wrapped in eggnog. With a splash of cognac. And a message from the divine. San José taught me dimension, the joy of overflowing and the eccentric spin of Little Richard. Seattle taught me the power of solitude, and the sound of trollies on a rainy night. Queen Anne taught me how to expand on a single mug of oolong. Paris taught me how to spurt rhapsodies of hardware in my sleep. Especially that shop in the Goutte d'Or with its window full of nuts and bolts. And suddenly I had a handful of levers, and salt, and things were going smoothly, like when a moment in time flies through a crochet stitch and becomes a picnic, and someone forgets to bring the brie, so we substitute an ellipsis for the pie, and achieve nirvana instead. 

And now for the good part. This is when the elbows get sticky and the bones feel oddly supple, and the wings you never knew you had spread and rip your T-shirt. Loving anything puts you at risk. You know that going in. But it can’t be stopped. It’s a dilemma. Percey Sledge hummed the melody of When A Man Loves A Woman his entire life but it took a painful breakup to bring it to the world. Somebody played the Michael Bolton version at their wedding and got divorced two years later. Just saying. Life is hard; art makes it adorable, and teal. You’ve got to savor every moment, because one day it will assemble into sidewalks, and birds, and heartbreak and screams, and become a novel. I also recommend wearing a lot of plaid. Each precious knee begins to snow somewhere inside its integument where there is nothing but fire and chiffon and a world of possibility. Snow is a code word for gusto. In other words, guts. Because everything is a snowflake when you think hard enough about rain, and how it can switch to snow at the drop of a few degrees, and stipple the background with memories. Bulbs, mostly, and some heartfelt invocations shouted into the night. Everything sooner or later weighs as much as it was worth to begin with. The buyout will buy nearly anything that lacks a core. But it won’t replace that. It won’t replace the dream. It had fingers moving around in it, and an intriguing philosophy based on stepladders, & gritty scintillas.