Office Envy

I envy people with offices. Lawyers especially, because they’re surrounded by books. Thick tomes full of laws and precedents and tragedies and spines with golden letters. Offices have an inherent respectability lending a feeling of solemn purpose to one’s endeavor. If you’re a writer, hoping for a quiet space to write when the world and its messy exigencies and blisters and blobs and children and fracases burst in on you at any moment, an office would be ideal.  

Or would it? Would the sobriety of rigid corners and thick oak desks and long shiny conference tables inhibit the impulses of creativity?  

There is something in the atmosphere of an office that imposes a need to conform, be polite, courteous, deferential, efficient. Creativity is the opposite of these. Creativity has nothing to do with efficiency. Or courtesy or obedience or tractability or acquiescence. Creativity arouses defiance, transport, ecstasy, fire, and subversive energies. There is always an element of destruction, of contrariness, of going against the grain. Friction, heat, angst, and selfish, riotous abandon. 

Writing requires a space that is outside the framework of time and its daily responsibilities. The Protestant work ethic, Lutheran sobriety, robotic, insect compliance. You can’t be a drone and an eccentric at the same time. Eccentric means, literally, you are outside the circle. On your own. A selfish jerk. Self-indulgent. Willful. Defiant. An insufferable prima donna. And probably poor and struggling to make the rent. 

Writing requires a space that is primarily mental. It has less to do with the physical dimension of walls and ceilings and more to do with how you feel. What are you capable of dreaming? Cooking up in that skull of yours? It helps to be a Prospero. A magician creating havoc and storms. An outcast with an impressive library and a head full of ganglions bursting with ideas.  

It’s difficult finding that level of sensitivity. It requires an abundant amount of idleness. Space for reverie. Drugs can help, but they’re more likely to create problems. Drugs are expensive and ultimately catch up with you and fuck with your health and sense of well-being. But you can learn to think like a drug. Don’t take heroin: be heroin. Don’t eat peyote buttons: be a peyote button.  

It’s really just a matter of allowing your self space to be. Being, in and of itself, is creative. Being is subversive. Hamlet was right on with his question about to be or not to be. That’s what it comes down to. Every time. To be or not to be. That really is the question.  

Midnight in Arizona

I am in a war against the literal. I have sewn these words together to make a stand of birch. I wander the earth gathering moon shadows and swords. Kerosene dots punctuate the Dakota night. An apparition of words hops through a calculus problem and falls into a trance. Rubber toys visit the sad navigation of a crew of astronauts, puzzled as they gaze through their porthole.  

The time is perfect for strawberries. I feel explicit and reproductive. I push my mind into words. Pronouns inflated with blood glitter like knobs. A wraith of steam is tattooed to an ocean doing celestial gymnastics.  

Experience is red when it slides through time. The airport runs wild with colors and rain, the atmosphere swollen with supposition. We assume we will fly. A crew of men grease the airplane. If there is enough faith to lift it into the air, we will arrive in time to see Arizona open itself to the wax of opinion. 

There is a cactus that pulls on our eyes and makes us see its full reality. There is a motel nearby with appliances that swarm with buttons and power. Beds like angels bouncing on a description of bone.  

I’m sitting at a desk, filling a page with muscle and sound. I believe the fork is a form of frozen fire. I hear the depths of the ocean hanging upside down. The color green mocks the turquoise water and salt and mistletoe lead to a brutal relationship with the planet. We seek redemption in the anguish of construction. We employ string for our amusement. The joining of wood is a pleasure measured in sawdust and dusk. A pool of emotion sweetens the shiver of ghosts. If I pull the curtains open, I can see various forms of movement deform the frontier of gravity. 

I fold my emotions and put them in a drawer of the heart. Anguish slobbers with thorns and balloons. One of them pops. A shattered mirror goes in pursuit of a lip.  

Morality enhances the experience of clothes. Nudity is something very different. If I write down a description of a woman’s breast, the paper grows profligate with symptoms of palpability. I carry the sky in a basket of clouds. I look for signs of monarchy. The genius of clouds bridges the crackling sky.  

Fingers were invented by doorknobs. That should be obvious. Checkout time is noon. It is always noon. Midnight is so very different. It tastes of impending intrigue. An excerpt from Baudelaire blazing on the page like a road flare.                    

  

 

 

 

Philosopher's Egg

We walk upright, our skin is naked and tender, our capacity for invention magnificent. Our sensations galvanize us into action, the depiction of animals of stunning grace, the murmur of subterranean rivers.  

A rag of infinity has been ripped from the wall of time and hangs here, a moon shadow trembling with claws. Picture this: strawberries sparkling with freshly fallen rain. It is a false image. It is the image of a pronoun stuffed with strawberry jam. Every time I push my mind to assemble these things with a set of words I feel like a washing machine grown arrogant with buttons and power.  

Can you believe everything I say? Anything at all that I say? Yes. Believe this. Believe that money is the fecal matter of the spiritually bankrupt. 

I believe that there are certain pains that glow like a whisper of crystal. And that the right combination of words will climb into the sun and become a giant cabbage running wild with colors and bombs.  

Emotion auctions the heart. It goes to the highest bidder, who is a woman of 40 from Beaumont, Texas. She takes a drug that causes silk and literature. One day she will be on television. Meanwhile, she is happy to flutter through the room like an insect with black shiny wings and nipples like dead violins. 

A Rembrandt brown walks across a canvas exasperated with bad jokes and convulses in the wind and rain. A swirl of universe sputters in the mouth like a mountain brook in love with communism. It says surrealism is alive to the unraveling of perspective. Well, I already knew that, but that’s ok. I still enjoyed writing it down.  

Words tremble with strange demands. They celebrate the spine of a divine scintillation. Their hallucinations seize the wind and fall into hypnogogic sensation. If anything of this is too vague, please let me know. Right now I am filling a void with the ageless exaltation of antelope bounding over the crest of a butte in Wyoming. Later I will set the oven for 350 degrees and slide a tray of lasagna in. All of this will later become apparent in emotion, sensation, and dreams, which are the alembic the alchemists called a philosopher’s egg.  

This was written in my sleep in the year 2013 using a bottle of perfume, a journey of universal connectivity, syllables secreted into a web of convulsive silk, and eight supple legs scampering about with an animal eye and a pound of sound condensed into teeth.

Steeped in Alias

I am steeped in alias. Veins inflated with pronouns. Identity is mostly steam from a boiling despair. My palette glitters with its toys. My swamp widens into exhortation. I dribble parables. The mouth is a house of malleable infantry. I carry a city of stentorian sounds.

Here comes a float heaving with pink. Take the moon elevator and strike the water. Grease happens when the engine is broken. Catch an airplane and prickle it into knobs. I write almond and cook it into fiddles. There is an oath that lifts it. And an oath that demands granite.  

I got spectrums. I got packages and mail. I got maturity and cream. We are together in this world. We are beyond recognition. We rattle and stomp. We summon angels and bounce.  

There is a tiger we sputter and a perception we wobble. We watch it progress into poetry and behave like a sky. Black makes it real and blue makes it feel. 

We manufacture what excites us. The heave of labor is built within the saw. Slide your ponder to the tip of the branch. Mushroom your flip into scent and sensation. It’s not a joke. Not entirely. Some of it is broth and some of it is both.  

We haul our hands by fingers. We navigate digits by fireworks and thought. We beg this emptiness to think. A spoon opens its energy and the road is suitably squeezed. War the genetic clench. Become a muscle in a Mediterranean garret. 

I seek the tolerance of dawn. Soap is for scrubbing the sun is for scrounging.  

Generate life by crashing into light. Diagnosis boils with the morality of the seashore, which is enhanced by cloth and amusement. Your cactus cuts please cut it out. The mirror is tangled in its own listening. Your face sounds irresistible. 

This is my wild cabbage buckle and this is my myriad minnow tilted into heresy. What bomb do I drop to see your spectral elegance? I bungled the hammer. Description is exasperating. We’ve picked the headland clean. There are only a few skates and speed bumps left to talk and catch the last light of the setting sun. Let us ruminate on pursuit.  On the pools and illusions as the dimming light sweetens the distance and ghosts tug at Cézanne. 

I am swollen now, and full of gnarled emotion. The garden path is teasing. But the gravity across an airplane accepts it to mirror the chrome.

 

Things Seen Recently While Out Running

A giant inflatable Santa Claus in front of a dilapidated house.  

A chow chow wandering among the figures of a crèche, wagging his tail. One of the wise men topples over.  

The day after Christmas a man stands outside his pale yellow house with a paint roller, painting over the words ‘ASSHOLE” written in huge red letters on each side of the house.  

Multicolored Christmas lights entwined around two white columns on a Dutch Colonial porch, steam venting from a brick wall, odor of fabric softener scenting the winter air.  

A middle-aged woman with blonde hair wearing a fur coat glides through a four-way stop in a black SUV just as I come running across. When I am inches from her window, she glances at me with a look of indifference.  

Frost on a bed of ivy.  

A thick layer of ice on the sidewalk, remnant of a garden hose left running.  

Black silhouette of a man walking on a yellow triangular sign against an opalescent sky in late December. The sign is a warning for disabled pedestrians. Yet the iconic man on the sign is walking robustly.  

The man gets down from the sign. He slides down the pole. He has no features. No nose, no eyes, no ears. He is simply a man walking. He is a sign. He is a sign of walking. He is a parody of walking. He is a flirtation with walking, an icon designed to catch the attention of drivers. People behind the wheels of their cars. Or motorcycle handlebars. Look out, the man says mutely in silhouette, there may be people crossing here whose bodies may have been compromised by age or injury or disease. But the man is momentarily gone. It is just a yellow sign. A yellow triangle. The man on the sign goes to the library to read a book. He reads a book of silhouettes. He reads a book of signs. He learns how to warn people. He learns how to deliver a clear message. He returns to the sign and climbs back up. He assumes his position, his left leg moving jauntily forward, his expressionless silhouette communicating a message as clearly as possible. Watch out. Pay attention. You are in a car. I am on a sign. Together we make a world. A world of warnings and signs. A world of attention and solicitation. Highways and maps. Incongruities and substitution and straw. Fickleness and treachery. Gladness and compassion. It’s all there. It’s all a sign. A big sign. A sign of sagas. A  body of law. Sunlight burning through mist creating opalescence and thaw.

Things That Glow

The red light on our kitchen stove when one or more burners are on, or something is baking in the oven.

The sections of glass in the Tiffany lamp under which our cat sleeps: buttons of amber, a butterfly with red and black wings, green leaves and white morning glories with yellow stamens.

The moon.

The tiny green light flashing in the lawn of an apartment building one night that caught Roberta’s attention while we were walking home from Café Vita. We were mystified. I bent down to look more closely. It turned out to be a warning light for a small lawn sprinkler.

The band of light on the CD player in our ’94 Subaru that flashes “reading” or “untitled” whenever we slide a CD in for play.

The Hall of the Eye at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

The colors in a dream.

Cephalopod luminescence.

Roof top cab signs.

The Christmas lights in the small glass jar covered with white lace that is currently situated beneath a large pine bookcase whose sides I carved in the front yard of a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains near Los Gatos and whose pattern I took from a book on Viking carving and consists of birds sitting amid foliage with berries in their beaks.

Traffic lights.

Motel signs, particularly the ones found way out in the desert, or great plains, in places like Kansas, or Missouri. The pop and ice dispensers at such motels. The silhouettes behind the curtains.

Streaks of orange and violet and gold at sunset.

The Nocturnal House at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo which housed fruit bats, a two-toed sloth and three-banded armadillo and had to close in 2010 due to budget constraints. I miss seeing the fruit bats hanging upside down, cocooned in their membranous wings, silent and still except for the occasional wriggle.

Bright yellow leaves constellating the sidewalk in late fall after it has freshly rained.

Coffee Foam

We entered the castle at dawn. The dim light feebly illumined an array of antiques and medieval weapons. Bats dangled from the high vaulted ceiling, enfolded in membranous wings. What were once chandeliers radiating light were encrusted with webs and the ancient wax of long dead candles. Our flashlights dazzled the walls. There were peacocks and angels, cherubs and robed women playing dulcimers. Reptiles skittered by. The strange predications of their skin displayed bright, iridescent colors and scales. A tall man in a black leather jacket, sunglasses, white cane, long shaggy hair and beard descended in a rickety elevator and introduced himself as Count von Zinzendorf, the legendary barista of Café Radis, who had long since retired and now spent his days reading old volumes in braille and feeding and stroking his reptiles. “How did you do it?” I asked. “How did you make those amazing coffee foam designs. Each one so unique, so spectacular, and you, a man who has been blind from birth.” “I feel a stirring in my blood,” he said in a voice so velvety it seemed itself to be the stuff of coffee foam. “I nimbly accept the toss of ocean waves. I feel the universe throbbing in my bones. I weigh the noise of my brain. As the world turns, I hear the calliope of our journey make its music in my wrists and fingers. My hands become birds, deft as the swallows that swoop the meadows of summer. And then the images come. I feel them as my hands trace their character and shape in the beverage. Would you like some coffee now?” He asked. I was breathless. “Yes, I would love some.” We entered the room where kept a number of espresso machines and samovars and jars full of tea. He produced two lattés and went to work, his hands quick as a magician’s making birds appear and disappear. “All my nerves shout summer when I do this,” he said. “I feel the glow of a thousand mornings and the deep peace of a Montana night, all simultaneously. Because this is the essence of coffee. It is morning and night in a single beverage.” When he finished, I looked at the images on the surfaces of the latté. In one was the face of a beautiful woman. In the other, was mine own face. Years later I married that woman whose face floated momentarily in that magnificent mug. Her name was Evelyn Lovelace, and she was a barista at the Café Mousse.