Little Pink Sounds

It is natural to push blue into wonder, clapboard the infinite with tea. What any apparition does to tea is more tumbled than lime. More palette with oars, more gaudy with straw. Just a blade whose prominence is an embryonic feather. Disturbance begins pushing itself toward Las Vegas for fulfillment and pardon. The heart agrees to create a tide pool in its subtleties. It is as if, in tea, the eyes were turning toward something cut out of the air. Dabs of blood or the soft mimicry of glue. Wisdom’s the first element to arrive in stars. It flavors push-ups when holes are present and each has the presence to escape into garments of silk and burlap. Envy is as expansive as the paraphernalia it envies. There is a certain jackknife to turn this seminal and circular in the elfin studio. It was bistros to station in naked confession. Caress a chew for orange. This is why I have flickered Bach at times, and devoted an anthology to the bones of any umbrella sanctioned by Lord Alfred Tennyson. Here is a tonic accentuated by veins of silver. Love me. Hold me. I am feeling like a sorcerer. I anticipate the kind of emotions that go with Hinduism and punctuation. This very paper imitates the crying of string. I have certain rascally expectations concerning this embarkment. France unfolds in ermine. There is, as you know, salvation in crows. You go ahead. I’ll stay here and figure the sky out. I don’t know what it’s doing here on the bottom shelf. Caravaggio is shrewdly churning among the propellers, as the paint has intended, and the beads have solicited reverie in their willingness to hang in the kitchen door like that. It opens me. It truly does. I feel open to just about anything, except austerity. I just don’t like it. It’s too, well, you know, austere. It’s not like sugar at all. I like the consonants in between, and the vowels that expand the mouth. Pleasure is a treasure. Emotion pours itself into the bloodstream expecting rain. And guess what happens? That’s right. It rains. And the vowels roll into consonants to allegorize the widening shadow of Sam and Dave sweating heavily in black pants and white shirts. The aim of any language is to alert the soul to music. Articulation burns with audacity when we touch the stars. History is kinetic because it happens that England is navigable and not at all the logical bear that we thought it was. Those men in red jackets with all that fur on their heads is purely for the tourists. The real poetry occurs elsewhere, in the little pink sounds that our napkins make when we hammer them with our alibis and fold them into folklore. The more adult smells tend to live on water. It is there one may expect to find daylight palpable as a bank caged in a world of adjectives, and the experience of bones stiffened by the grace of lobsters.

Alien Melodies

Butterflies in a parable do a loop around the word ‘spirit’ to demonstrate the swans of France. My lungs raise this image to sound in order to give it some semblance of substance. The facts that we experience appear varied, but they’re the same reality and everything is established by means of dust. As for me, I like to ponder strawberries. The air walks into my lungs and comes back out as words. Each probe excites a representation of pumice. Even the sky supports a certain amount of pandemonium. A little paint helps create a sense of Spanish lingerie.

And in the case of qualities, when a quality is established, it is established in opposition to another. For example, a dance is different than an onion, although a church is identical to a football. And sometimes an onion is easily comparable to a ziganka. One time I slept in the seed of an Angel Trumpet for edification. I awoke feeling engorged and visible, though more like a trombone than a bassoon. Sleep is like that. It awakens us to foreign rhythms, alien melodies. I like to think of it as a way to adjust to the vagaries of pewter.

A tree exists, therefore, upon the opposition and unity of its parts. A gardenia is more like an archive. I feel it do handsprings among my buttons. I lift myself into resilience and construct an analogue to equilibrium. A fish scurries by dynastic as a knee. History widens to include a valley. A reality is that which creates a single system. The swan appears to ruminate within itself and the sign of the swan appears to grow from this conjunction of intellect and squeegee. This is because the feathers communicate a plausible calm. The music twists it into perfect justification.

There is a cure for remorse developed beneath the berries. I can’t say which berries, which is unfortunate, but since we’re talking remorse, the berries must be very red and exquisitely delicious. The tangle of thorns is to be expected. Such is life. The imponderable drills its way into a cafeteria and walks in supposition among the pies. Thus, we have modified the violin to inflate with hawthorn. There is a pocket whose meanings shine like the clouds on a sunny day, and it is in this pocket that I find sufficient change to buy anything I want in the metropolis of a toad. Whatever I swallow shatters like succotash in my stomach and turns to protein and carbohydrate. I emerge from this meal a new man. New in my jeans, new in my shirt, new in everything sans buttons, which are continuous and tutelary, and buttoned in sequence, which is beneficial and holy, and performed in secret by finger and thumb.

You Don't Have to Read This

I get it. Poetry is an effort. Language is an effort. Words are an effort. Reading words is an effort. A big effort. It takes energy. Attention. Focus. Who has that? Nobody. So truly. I mean it. You don’t have to read this. If you’re already reading this you can stop. You don’t have to continue. Go do something else. These words excuse you. I excuse you. This isn’t important. It’s not going anywhere important. I have nothing to say. I have nothing to convey. Go make jello. Go fishing. Build a kite. Raise a kid. Have sex. Take a shower. Brew a beer. Bake cookies. Get drunk. Go to college. Learn how a differential equation can be represented as a linear operator acting on y(x) where x is usually the independent variable and y is the dependent variable. In this instance y is a finishing school, x is a perturbation, and the result is a Mexican hairless. But if you’re still reading, if you’ve come this far, I’m impressed. You are among the truly committed. And by that I don’t mean to imply that you need to be committed ha ha, but that your attention is quite amazing. I wish I had more to offer you. An image, for example. Picture Wyoming. There. I did it. I created an image. Wyoming. Do you see it? The hills? The buttes? The rocky outcrops? The ponies racing toward the horizon? The trucks barreling down I-80 toward Rock Springs? And to think. All I said is Wyoming. And there’s Wyoming. Do you see how easy it is? To create things with words? But unless you can get someone to come and read the words you put down they just sit there. They don’t go anywhere. There is no Wyoming without someone to read Wyoming. To imagine Wyoming. To see Wyoming in your mind. To feel Wyoming in your soul. Thank you. Thank you for reading this far and sharing Wyoming with me. Thank you Wyoming. Thank you language. Thank you words. Thank you syntax. Thank you logic. Thank you illogic. This has been rewarding. And now it’s time to get up and do something else. Play a guitar. Get famous. Stand on a stage. Scream into a microphone. Hop up and down.

The Squirrel that Ate Cincinnati

If tuna is immediate and scratched, is salt rational? Honesty heaves itself at my energy and makes me feel bald and useful. But why tuna? Why salt?

Tuna is specific and salt is stunning. Each time I construct a moment of sand all the words in the sentence bristle in agreement with art and produce a sensation not unlike initiation. Words, pushed out of the mouth and into somebody’s ears, will reassemble themselves in a strain of thought, straining to become more meaningful, more like butter, or semen.

Mosquitos, meanwhile, give their blood to a napkin. I collapse from too many scruples and crawl into a convulsion somewhere near the Rio Tinto Zinc Mine to get rid of them. If that seems subversive, so be it. The drug that brought me here is orange and opposable as a thumb. Therefore, send me a dollar and I will swim in your beautiful gaze like a new experience. We can be caviar together and create metaphors for the stars. God knows they need them.

Yeah, like a hole in the head.

Please forgive me. My tongue is an animal.

This afternoon I saw a woman pass the library with the skinniest two legs I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why I mention this, it has no importance outside of writing, where language occurs, trembling with truths so intractable they have to be tilted.

This proves my theory about ecstasy. That it goes through a series of complex maneuvers to attain enlightenment, and shrubbery. Sometimes the table squirts itself against a bowl, and sometimes it is the bowl that vomits a table and impersonates Chicago.

A face is more like a moon. It is a noun with nowhere to go except the fact of its own existence.

A cloud flaps out of a cocoon of words and fills the air with thought. In fact, it is a thought. Soft and misty and tingly on the skin. You know? Just like an airport that follows you home and you have to take care of it and feed it airplanes every day.

Metamorphosis concludes the day by dancing on the valve of a trumpet. Which changes into a crease. Which changes into a golf club. Which changes into an abalone. Which changes into a mustache. Which changes into a squirrel. And eats Cincinnati. All of it, including the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, and most of William Howard Taft Road.

I’m sorry this happened. Sometimes these poems get out of control. Nothing remains the same. They have to rub themselves up against everything, bridges, hotels, cafeterias, distilleries. It all occurs with or without our complete attention and we are free to shovel coal or saw the sky in half and watch as heaven and all its angels come tumbling out. Some of us inhabit bodies for the sole purpose of reproduction and good jobs and cable TV, and others surrender themselves to the glimmer of alternate realities and translate the hollowness of existence into an interesting alternative to moss.

As for me, I rely on tactility. It is tactility that pilots my fingers. Solitude does the rest.

The Insights Unlock

Time is ornithological. It flies. It honors nightclubs and noise. To explain this it’s necessary to say something about infinity. Infinity has no napkins not even hair. It is the reason that bruises are crabby and haggard and that there is one bean. That the alchemist’s height reflects plumbing from chains is providence. It is a sublimate of the new walk the alchemy teaches. Further volumes are bottled in red until they exceed cinnamon. But if the whale turns wife than an idea of ownership extends the warranty to gut. That which the flood renders is rather immediate to the French we abandon. Fat examinations are was to the is of a skull. Paradigm this red. The fugues teeming between intonations of Apollinaire are riveted in gravity, like pickles. Gluttony is more like glasses. A crab contrasting that hammer with the world is swollen to indeterminacy. The morning bends into fish. In comes employment squirting grout like a rubbed tube. We put the olives in absence so effervescently that a mouth speaks of ambiguity upside-down in a room of kerosene thrilling and slow. Personality occasions a more residual evergreen of the animal chair. The bulb is washed for loops. Nothingness stinks of eyes. Duty begs for grandeur but pathos thrills with spoons. Fiber and cloth and destiny. Spectral apples based on the strength of being hugged by existence until the morality of bone heaves with winter and the abstraction machine carries its jellyfish into the sanctity of metaphor. I am imposed at declension. Space itself is ugly until it serves to excite gravity to inseminate our abstractions with granite. And this is triangles. Just pure and simple cotton. Never mind the oars. Or the wars. Successions of protoplasm tickle the biology of cause until it opens within a sack of pretzels. And then it becomes more like syntax and is accentuated by veins. I am feeling like a sorcerer does who labors to produce a formula for Portugal. Many of my emotions are another slow story on its way to allegory. And this causes birds in the neck to come out of the mouth as birds. Or words. Or fingers smeared with starlight. An emotion flooded with eyeballs scratches this chiaroscuro and makes it pavement. This is why paradigms don’t invoke stoves. They’re more like gluing the rain together. And the blast behind this is pharmaceuticals. The heart of the café is excused by steam. This is so that the mirrors reflect the ooze within and the insights unlock.

 

As Your Azure

As the sun rises, so does my consciousness emerge from the depths of sleep.

As I read Le phénomène érotique exige la venue du Jugement dernier by Jean-Luc Marion online, I hear the rustle of newspaper pages as Roberta reads today’s news on the couch behind me. The headline reads: A humble salute: 2 historic anniversaries noted this year along with Memorial Day: Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, and July is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. World War II veterans are dwindling fast, and the U.S. has no living World War I vets.

As I sip the last of my coffee, I wonder what time I will go for a run.

As I am little persuaded to believe that a large yet largely invisible omniscient and omnipotent deity resides in the sky and whose image resembles that of a muscular, athletic man in late middle-age with shaggy long white hair and beard and a stern countenance, and who can be invoked during times of hardship, towns devastated by tornado, famine brought on by drought, cities blackened by cholera and other devastating epidemics, even though these occurrences have to be attributed to the same deity since said deity is omnipotent and responsible for creating all things in the universe, I am nevertheless inclined to believe that everything in the universe is imbued with divine energy.

As You Like It is one of my favorite plays by William Shakespeare.

As the unprecedented influx of people into Seattle continues unabated, it becomes exponentially harder to drive. One must frequently wait for a car to travel down a narrow residential street, factor in an extra hour for traveling during rush hour, as making a trip to the airport or dentist.

“As Time Goes By” is a song written by Herman Hupfeld for the 1931 Broadway musical Everybody’s Welcome. The song was re-introduced in 1942 in the film Casablanca. It was sung by Dooley Wilson and heard throughout the film as a leitmotif. Alto saxophonist Dexter Gordon recorded a version of it in 1985 for his album The Other Side of Round Midnight. Bob Dylan, then known as Bob Zimmerman, performed the song on January 9^th, 1959, at the Jacket Jamboree in Hibbing, Minnesota.

As the World Turns was an American television soap opera that aired on CBS from April 2^nd, 1956, to September 17^th, 2010.

As the world turns at approximately 18 miles per second, the day shifts from the long crisp shadows of morning to the stark energies of noon to the quieter lingering shadows of late afternoon, shadows which lengthen into night, and which reappear the next day as the cycle of the planet’s spin goes on and on, day and night shifting their scenes as humans shift from moment to moment of their lives creating a continuous, never-ending drama.

As I put on my running clothes, I hear someone in the laundry room shift their laundry to the dryer, followed by the hum of the dryer and the click of zippers and buttons against the metal surface of the drum, followed by the click of the door latch as the laundry room door is closed.

A sad size a size that is not sad is blue as every bit of blue is precocious, wrote Gertrude Stein one hundred years ago in Tender Buttons.

Breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness, wrote William James in Essays in Radical Empiricism. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.

As dye molecules diffuse slowly into the region where they are less concentrated, regardless of the presence of other solutes, so does a perception diffuse into our nerves, stimulating a response or thought or provoking a higher level of awareness.

Awareness resembles awakening in its dilation, its expanding horizon of information, much of which can be overwhelming, as the waves at sea can be overwhelming for a small boat, or the progress of Arthur Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, immersed in delirium the same way the mind can be agitated to states of ecstasy by an hallucinogenic drug, suggesting that as a poem dilates the mind with its metaphors and analogies, creating a fresh perspective of the world, making the ordinary suddenly extraordinary, the mind is both made unsteady and enriched by the destabilizing forces of the poem, or drug.

As I put on my socks, I hear François Hollande address France during the 3:00 p.m. news on France 2: “ce vote est un defiance à l’égard de l’Europe, à l’égard du government, aussi bien de la majorité que de l’opposition,” he proclaims, with reference to the election results yesterday in which France’s National Front Party, their extreme right wing, triumphed over the other parties, garnering a whopping 26% of the vote, and indicating a clear movement toward fascistic policies. The sense of shock and dismay is in the tone of his voice. He sits at a desk. Behind him is the French flag and shelves of books. The shelving consists of a dark hardwood, oak or cherry, with modest decorations rendered in boiserie. All the books have shiny golden spines. Hollande’s hands rest on a golden mat and go into movement as he pleads for sanity.

I like the expression “as is.” As in, here, this is available now at a cheap price, as is, in its full reality, nothing altered, all of its imperfections in full view, the very embodiment of truth, reality, and the raw immediacy of the tuneless world. As is is as as as an as can be. As your azure. As your razor. As has an as in assonant jazz.   

 

Ridiculous

The glow of old age drops from a black lamp of regret. Light and regret mingle to create this glow. Odd glow. Odd odd glow of regret. Which is a feeling. Which is an image. Which is a frustration. As if one walked around with a museum inside. And that museum had glass cases and dioramas the way museums do. And shells and skeletons from previous ages. Imprints of plants, ferns and tiny sea creatures in limestone. Sandstone. And so I see dioramas of regret. Like little dramas occurring ages and ages ago. And still going on. This theater. This life. 

Language rolls through my brain in apples and stars. Consonants big as wheels. Rubber wheels whose tread is consonant with the vowels of movement. And all this occurring among the waves of consciousness. What is called consciousness and is described as waves. Which are consonants and vowels in an image of emerald water with energy moving through it. So that a wave is created. So that consonants and vowels mingle in an emerald shape of movement. Below which are the creatures living in a medium of language. Creatures of sound and meaning that develop out of language. And crawl into the world. Crawl across a sheet of paper. Shells and antennae in the movement called curiosity. 

And when they die they become fossils of regret in a museum of regret. Because regret is an emotion whose monumentality requires the stolidity of glass and marble. And will not go away. But whose dramas go on and on and are never resolved.  

Because we create ourselves at each moment. The simple act of perception is a moment of creation. Moments of creation. That are inherently imperfect. As if there were but one correct way of seeing. Which would be ridiculous. Ridiculous considering the size of the universe. Ridiculous. 

My skin was forged in a plywood cocoon. And is therefore ridiculous.

 

The tug rattles chewing the waves. Ridiculous. 

Volition within the involuntary is the paradoxical formula for the possible dissolution of the antinomy of aesthetic domination. This is how I escape the banality of form and develop a thesis of radical effusion. That seeks its own form. A new form. A form like fornication, or rapids, or petty bourgeoisie, or rutabaga. Like these, but none of these. Itself, unique and gabled and soft as a hunting jacket. 

 

Or sanctuary.  

My eyes open and monstrosities of form and scintillation jump inside and go to my brain for interpretation. Visceral shadows push them into language. Where they become a romance novel with Fabio on the cover.  

Here is a flavor freighted with faith. Faith tastes of monasticism. Cold mornings and wine at twilight. Hypnosis and cactus and French ocher and gamma globulin. All ridiculous. 

Life? Ridiculous. Mustaches? Ridiculous. Mezzotints? Ridiculous. Sarcophagi? Not so ridiculous. But ridiculous all the same.