My Big Bob Dylan Fantasy

I wish I was Bob Dylan if I was Bob Dylan

Everyone would love me even if I was being

A total asshole most of the time and once made

Brian Jones cry

Why you ask why would you want to be Bob Dylan

That certainly wouldn’t make Bob Dylan happy

Even Bob Dylan’s not entirely happy being Bob Dylan

Are you up to the job? Can you write great poetry

And play the guitar no I can’t

Play the guitar but I can write great poetry

If I put my mind to it

I could even learn to the play the guitar

I could get a book telling me how to play the guitar

And go buy a guitar

And make sounds come out of the strings

Like filigrees of willow & studios of gold

Sparkling waterfalls ghosts & antiques

But which Bob Dylan would I want to be

The young Bob Dylan in suede & blue jeans

With Suze Rotolo on his arm or the Blonde on Blonde

Bob Dylan with his scarf & outrageous hair

Or the goofy Basement Tapes Bob Dylan

In which he resembles Harpo Marx

A clown in a basement with a weight lifter & a ballerina

Midget paper delivery guy & Rick Danko on accordion
Or the elder Bob Dylan with the tired sagging face

And the voice like a tractor pulling a weight

Of astonishing emotion bitter northern winds & rawhide

Afternoons long journeys with no resolution

Yes yes I say that Bob Dylan because I’m already old

And my desires are still young

And I’m still learning how to be the person I already am

Which has taken nearly seven decades

A handful of pharmaceuticals & an unfocused rage

And I’m still in that skin still in that cage

Warming the bed with my bones

And waking up to do it again and again until I don’t

The Mind is Indigo

An emotion floats and circulates the imposition of cloth. Baudelaire deduces a skunk. A bus station accommodates reading. If you slam this it is fast remembered as a capillary, like the odor of elephants in our dreams. Ugly oracles haunt the houses of Louisiana. And what this means is squirrels. A paradigm blisters with disagreement and flowers into gold. I feel thick and bubbly. Explanations secede from England where our screws sheer reflection, ear into a thin sound of thatch. Calculus spouts air at the garish antique. The forest grows still. We erect our bulb. Float over France because bronze is no beginning at all. Play is increasingly the glue excelling at adhesion. Sagacity and embroidery are the struts of which participles sputter stimulation. Words increase by grappling with ethics and sleight of hand. The day is teasing its frame and the story is in the bungalow. Growth is structural in our evolution but I touch the atmosphere and crack and my guitar makes sounds with nothing ecclesiastical for the crabs. I think my exasperation is catalogued as a lap dance that a subversive culture counsels by symbolism. My serape secludes its algebra in slosh pockets. Soap sips privacy from a Russian guide. Energy shines from matter, wampum like corduroy and glue. Clothing I hear comes from the sound of machinery and confusion clashes with the morality of size. The allegory cradles a newborn philosophy. Power is empty and when its power is truly powerful it springs into fabric like a kangaroo. I’m filled with premonition. The paragraph has given birth to a thermometer. Consciousness is brown, like the indifference of the dryer. The mountain is absorbed by punctuation even though singing had not yet been invented. What is truth? A sneeze spinning around like a flailing thought that verifies the naturalness of the chisel. We’re captivated by the new airplane. A few of us from the swamp are complemented by its unabashed flippancy. The grebe falls suddenly from the sky in undulations of grace. I need a copy of ears, a gentle rain that glides through consciousness while stirring the radio. Garnish crinkles cod as we crinkle science. Today is without precedent, a flicker of time permitted by the uncertainty principle. Meaning seeps through these words, and it’s irritating. Virtue is not always amiable. Sometimes a hat is necessary. Writing is always paper, the inertial mass of a single railroad car. I am a fold of night, a dream swimming with little rubbery outlines. I’m going to be happy when happiness becomes my clouds and powwows. I like emphasis and quitting. There is a dukedom in my head like an outdoor dining patio. Museums, theaters, fine dining and shopping. Let’s talk about seeing things and hose the culture down with sadness and vigor. It’s snowing in Asia. Therefore, a sequence of probabilities can be calculated by using the Schrödinger wave equation. Blood is awkward. Desire is French. Detachment expands the circle. An emotion wrinkles the paper and I juggle knives constructed out of words. I don’t know what to call this exercise in pepper. This fandango of slop. It’s a little ambiguous, but it’s also a living. What can I say? I feel things, and the mind is indigo.

 

Between Hotels

Nothing escapes necessity except the necessity to escape. The world is a place of migration. The colors of the horizon are eternally alluring. It’s a mood that you carry with you, like a crumpled ball of aluminum foil. Each moment is a voyage. Press a button in the elevator and see where it takes you. Mutations are normal. In fact, plans for a new kitchen are spread across the table this very day. It sings in my blood like protein. I can smell the music in an Idaho potato. The door hangs from its hinges pleading to be opened. After all, this is art. Perception is a process, not a jackknife. We’re talking black pepper, marjoram, kaffir lime, aromas that are distinct on their own but send wearers on imaginary getaways and daydream rendezvous when blended with other scents.

Be kind to your legs. Let them finish what they’re doing. Remember: the moon’s distance from the center of the earth is 240,000 miles.

A sentence can justify so many things, including consciousness, which is a basket of light. Vermillion murmurs like an apple hanging in the brain of a blackbird.

Gravitation is mutual. For every action an equal and opposite reaction is produced. Marilyn Monroe wore nothing to bed but a few drops of Chanel No. 5. This proves that the dark is a contradiction of stones and sponges wet and sparkling, funky and fresh.

Every fundamental event in the universe can be interpreted by bringing it close to your face and sniffing it. The olfactory membrane inside the human nose has 50 million receptor cells capable of transmitting information on some 10,000 different odors and is the only part of the central nervous system that has direct contact with the external world.

This includes Wednesday, granite, and meat. It might also mean hair, or a simmering example of vanity.

Infinity climaxes as a shadow by percolating itself through a pretzel. This creates a semantic powder called seeing. The obstetrics of upheaval arrive in perception tracing a ripple of time. Repair yourself with pain. This will entail fatalism. Blood is alive with thirst and will play with secretion until a sentence is produced answering prophecy with criticism and adapting to the vagaries of digestion with exquisite conjugation.

And just like a library where you can find all the best books, the human mind starts the sexual morning with a bubbly ear and raw dancing. The riddle of malt whiskey wanders through consciousness like a swollen begonia. Contrasting cries for help grow into prose with literal terra-cotta sideburns. The floorboards creak. Even the accordion over there in the corner has something to say about Being.

Quality, whatever it may be, is revealed to us as being. This will appear obvious if the gas station is open. The car submits a headlight, a bell rings, and everything falls into place, including these words, which are tilted toward an expectation of bugs.  

 

The Urge to Create

The urge to create is explicit. It’s prodigal and incendiary. Words are forged in a furnace of snow. Clouds boil with purple. The sand turns crimson. My mind fills with reflections. I become voracious for gold. For liberty. For a life lived among horses. My sternum is made of syllables. I can abandon nothing. I’m invested in everything.

The urge to create is pure energy. The music of amphetamines. I want to touch everything. Water, bones, mud. An insect cupped in my hand spreads its wings. The wings are transparent and veined.

The mind isn’t matter but pure energy. Waves. Electrical impulses. The charm of language clarifies this fact. We laugh, we sing, we eat, we sleep. I’m captivated by the organization of bees. The production of honey. The electrical energy of all those insects combining to produce a liquid gold.

The heat of my breath fills a word. Desire opens the world. A storm of sound is assembled on the neck of a guitar. Adjectives swarm over a sentence fueled by predication. Almonds on a blue plate. Time uncoiling in a proverb. A maturing sun. A lake gone mad with the sparkle of diamonds.

A robe of silk hangs on a tin skeleton. We name him Falstaff. The café goes about its business as usual, serving ham and scrambled eggs and pancakes smothered with blueberry syrup. The tide begins to rise. The mind fills with thought. A fan twirls on a tablespoon. Art creates new perceptions, the silk of listening, the appeasement of anger, a tiger gliding through the liquid of the eye.

What is morality? Wine in a crystal glass. A still life by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. The caress of warm water on the skin. The value of friendship. A mountain climbing through your hands.

Eggplant is an agreeable form. Gold is an agreeable metal. It doesn’t belong to the world. It belongs to a supernatural beauty. Parables helps us discover what is gold and what is not gold. The entrance to the cave is blocked. Some of us see shadows. Some of us see fire.

Jellyfish wash ashore, iridescent and beautiful. New perceptions infuse old memories. Experience feeds on experience. It’s a never-ending tautology. The way out is through words incarnating the tangle of the mind. A grebe falls from the sky and plunges into the water. A ghostly necessity falls through a hole in my personality. I can feel the weight of your eyes reading these words. They’re not my words. They’re not your words. They don’t belong to anybody. That’s what makes them words. The weight of your voice putting breath and motion into the words. They exist for your breath. For my breath. For the breath of the unborn. For the breath of the dying. For the breath of cougars and lightning in the distance.

I love the odor of a freshly painted canvas. The construction of snow. The depiction of trees in a shock of wind. Cold and rain. Totems in the fog.

Each thing has a presence.  Napkins, sidewalks, forests. Old barns smelling of horse piss and hay. A bag of freshly bought hardware nails. Gargoyles atop the walls of Sainte-Chapelle. The charm of development. Words propagating like waves where ideas float.

Ideas are hyper-objects, like Nebraska. They’re composed of thought and paper. Wolves and abandoned farmhouses. Spiders and squirrels. Sawdust. A wrinkled old face. Man or woman. Makes no difference when you reach a certain age. Descriptions get smaller. Ideas get larger. Biology becomes unpredictable. Life gets crazy. Intentions get lost in their own manipulations. A corpse falls out of a closet. A rag on a window sill saturates with water. The whole idea of representation is strange. Writing is not a contact sport.

How is it possible to be in a crowd of beings similar to ourselves and yet feel unique? That our own personal narrative is singular and gallant? Is vanity a good thing or a bad thing? Why bad? Why good? Isn’t the good sometimes bad and the bad sometimes good?

The components of sleep glow in a swimming pool. Chiaroscuro is indispensable. Dissonance makes life tolerable.

Impulse is great but you have to learn to accept the bite of remorse.

Me, I like umbrellas. I rejoice in begonias. I kiss the moon. I can hear my heart beat. The parliament is in session. I hear a siren. The cat coughs up a fur ball. I tear off a paper towel and wipe up the vomit. It’s still warm from his body. Outside, the willows sway. Space goes on being space. What was space before there was space? Can gravity be bottled and sold to those who are tired of floating? What would the dead tell us if they were able to return? Do they come to us in dreams? Or are dreams just dreams and nothing else? If time cold be folded and put in a suitcase, which hours would I choose to bring with me?

I like two o’clock. Always have. And midnight. Midnight is the rupture of rapture in an invisible ear. Sleep and rain in perfect conjunction. The affiliation of thought with the warrant of the sky.

The afternoon lifted itself into my eyes and said hi, it’s two o’clock. Midnight stopped by later and we drank until morning. I awoke feeling strangely beautiful. I became a glissando. Snow fell on the river. My lips danced on syllables until my tongue got drunk. I bought tickets for Paris.

I need the lucidity of water. It inspires me. Rain, rivers, puddles, oceans, lakes, ponds. It assumes so many forms. But it is finally the currents of the Seine in January that fascinate me, that make me want to write something. The turbulence is exciting and menacing. Even if, weeks later, I end the day by doing the dishes. Something was said. Something needs to be said. Something always speaks.

 

 

Action Inaction

Consciousness is exhausting. And so is rubber. But what is reality? That question gets asked a lot. But does anybody have an answer? A lot of people do. They’re called philosophers. I like to think of reality as a blatant wind thudding through the trees, beating drums and hallucinating. It’s either that or a garage door. Those creaks and springy sounds they make when they open and all those funny odors come flying out.

As you might’ve guessed, I like maneuvering words. It allows me to act like Technicolor. I can glow into longhand or type my way into hills of assumption. But it’s this private pain that is so hard to put into words. I feel like an ocean engorged with squid. I use forceps to handle the pronouns. They’re so slippery. And they smell of abstraction, like the rain. The shoulder was invented to carry the burden of the world. We also have totems, and tattoos and trumpets. These things help.

One day I hope to evoke everything in a single sentence and retire. I will learn to play the Fauve guitar and create sounds of such savage hue that the effect will feel more like a punch to the stomach than a religious belief. A song is a form of bruise and if it wrinkles it will clutter with scientific handshakes and resemble a forest of boiling taxis.

Dragons of concentration ride on streams of consciousness. The lumber is perfectly present, however imperfectly sawn, or expressed in grammar. Verticality has its shadows. But the slobber of abstraction enriches our perspective of cloth.

Pain is often sexual. Which is why it is so often a pleasure. There are adjectives available to describe this phenomenon, and bungalows in which to enact it. The sound of it gets sweet and light drips from the lamps ins scarves of delicate implication. The climate unseals itself in scripture. Silk trails across the neck. Sensations of creative liberation run along a tangent of bone and skin trembling with examples of gold. There is clutter in consciousness and proposition and meaning. This is what makes it so energetic. So impenetrable to gravity. Even the limestone swarms with its science.

Life is erratic and conversational. There is a house in New Orleans where we find this amply demonstrated in a general looseness of direction and antifreeze. Experience tastes like chicken. Experience is what happens when syllables interact with milk. The map collapses into words dripping with Delaware. We can smell tallow. Intentions are hectic with tin. A harridan rages within a leviathan RV. The TV is unpredictable. Each day has its own sounds and odors. And it drives us crazy.

When Mick Jagger asked me to join the Rolling Stones, I didn’t know what to say. I jingle when I walk. And my keys are always a little sticky during the summer. I can juggle a few oranges but I refuse to bark like a dog. Language is hallucinatory. But powerful. If they can use a song writer I can use a wider desk.

The politics of the potato are a little strange, but worthwhile remarking. I can still smell the dirt. Clearly, there is a trace of Paris in the salon, and if this conversation is to continue, let’s let the subtleties stir into action. The drop of a nail can sound like an epitome. And the paragraph has given birth to a turnstile. What do you say we pass through, and let Portugal overwhelm us with its haircuts and cork.

Culture is ontological. A fist of ganglions holds a pound of sugar in each skull, in each maieutic balloon. Dignity is round like a reproductive organ. My skin tells a story of labor and pain. If your  mouth is in prison, you should visit more bars. There are too many referents but not enough signs. The present tense is tart as a martini olive, but the future is in vermilion, anxious and ornery like the twinkle of an incendiary noun.

For the ocean is plunged into its own diversions and when the river becomes a waterfall the hunchback of Notre Dame walks among these words murmuring something about ornaments. I sometimes imagine that the dead are trying to pull us into their realm. Heaven’s parabola slams into fireworks. We need to re-enchant the world. Seethe in awakened syllables. The capacity to gaze at something, anything, is a gift. I like to watch my hand dance on the ceiling. I like to gather its shadows and squeeze them into words. Why is there something instead of nothing? All five senses insist that there is more to a goblet than pewter. The table causes itself by pressing its surface against the hands. When we walk in exhibition of ourselves we are purple. But when consciousness dissolves in sleep, the house of language opens its doors. Everyone is welcome to attend. Just do what the words suggest. Camaraderie is prodigal. The journey begins with a single ghost. This is why I smell like a suitcase. I’m not from here. I’m from elsewhere. For who hasn’t felt the wind in their hair and wondered what time breakfast is served in the afterlife?

 

The Tongue is a Strange Machine

Enigmatic Corot that a chicken thickens if a cut thrills. I strain a spoon to hit the moon. The singing sidewalk is my blossoming and bile. I smell incense below the float and start the car. I will push this idea until it crackles below the bean bang.

The performance glows and we feel its heavy steam. We assembled the stomach during the fall and luxuriated in winter feeling it work itself into rhetoric. I bald into honesty like paint. The dusty soliciting of spring became my cause and controversy. I stood there in the orchard including sense in my art and absorption.

We can maneuver the fence if the court so deems it necessary for our escape into the wilderness. Jerk a swim through the pool. If you lose yourself during the elevation you will find resurrection in the consonants strewn throughout the sentence. The proposal attends your punches. One must endure one’s secretions as they become implicit in perception.

Mark this, my friend, the bowl will quicken as it fills with ice. Scribbles toss themselves into circulation. I feel the pulse of an indentation brush a babble with an admonition. Plump my draw to a collar stud. I can only answer the wonder of myriad structures since I branch into many coconuts and burn the deformation with laughing up there.

We play the trapeze and tap the wall with autonomy. We pull our excuses out of a perception of ratio and make proverbs out of silk. Our assembled logic accommodates gravity, crustaceans it to vermilion, and we go ahead and pull the rest, fastening our spoons as we go. There is cement for exploration and glass for decipherment. We clothe our echoes beneath knowledge and see what green Apollinaire wore when he flowed toward the mysteries of secretion.

It’s in the streams that our reflections pin themselves to the water disturbing the graces of the heart. We linger to collect ourselves and travel into the beyond weeping over the compliments of apples. Conceit is a form of coherence. It is the mind we hope to press against when we write something. The tea is cluttered with subtleties, too many to describe as sidewalks or cloth, which have their own distinctions, and inflate with the nutmeg of desire.

We fill our anthologies with aesthetic persuasions that never quite gel into paradise. Confusion explains the larynx. We flail what we can with our theories and tumble vowels on our lips. I can’t quit altitude. There is the spring to the blade of my knife and age is a palette whose colors can never adjust to the brass of trouble. Cream by violin, and use binoculars for the rest.

My feelings fight for the rub of the wave. I can do nothing without teeming. I feed my insistence the clang of the sleeve and wash the greenery with meditation. The tongue is a strange machine, though some might call it a muscle. I call it a convocation of cells and let it shape the song as it will.

Radical Tapioca

“All philosophy,” observed Paul Valéry, “is born knowingly from illusions which are illusions of language.” Words are signs for things and not the things themselves. Words are illusions. Their relation with things is uncertain, inconstant, and indeterminate. But here is a paradox: since words are untethered to the concrete world, their representation of experience is infinite, and because it is infinite, it is real. There is no limit to the variety of phenomena and sensations already in existence or in which there is a probability or possibility of bringing them into existence. The words themselves might serve as their own experience. This is a situation in which illusion assumes the audible ineffability of inconceivable harmonies. The patterns that make Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik a tour de force of transcendent beauty, that give it its enery and clarity, its buoyancy and depth of emotion, are stunningly real. But in the truer sense of the real, the reality of stone and water, the reality of bone and refrigerator, the music belongs to the higher abstractions of time and wave.

When one is conscious of, or knows, an object, it is an error to say that the object in itself and our knowledge of the object are two distinct facts. Hyper-objects, such as government, are particularly interesting: government has no reality, there is nothing tangible about government, government is a concept; and yet government is quite real. We pay taxes to it, elect officials to it, expect it to provide us with streets and libraries. Government is a product of language. Language creates laws, breaks laws, tells stories of outlaws. Language is the ultimate outlaw.

Taken in this sense, unicorns, dragons, and brigadier generals all lay equal claim to being, and having, a reality. What gives them that reality is the way in which we experience them. Imagine them. A single word, such as the pronoun “I,” can serve as the nucleus for a range of experience including peacocks, obsequies and clover. Tapioca, doors, and pumpkins. In the realm of illusion, I is an other: its reality is called into being by the simple act of writing. Of talking. There is an otherness to it because as soon as an identity is proposed as a symbolic entity, its reality changes. It enters into an arena of magic, of profound sorcery. Whenever someone says “I,” we  -  another  pronoun with the weight of a helium balloon  -  know that the stream of verbiage issuing from that personhood of “I” is an eye into the storm of their being. We also know that the word “I” and the person claiming that “I” as a locus of intimate experience, has just entered into the vast ocean that is language, has diffused into its boundless horizon.

In other words, “I,” “We,” “They,” and “You” are all propositions, all shades and inclinations of personhood in relation to oneself or other people. But in what sense do any of them have reality? The word “you” cannot be eaten, tasted, squeezed, pressed, ironed, nailed, packed or crushed. But it can be spoken. It can be written.

You are reading an essay when along comes a dragon and invites you to go on a journey to a realm of illusion. Are you real? Or not real? Is the dragon real, or not real? The dragon is, in fact, a yearning fleshed out in wing and claw. It has a thyroid, lungs, and mild case of bursitis.

My eyes, ears, skin and hair are all real. But when I convert them into words they blaze into deputation. Their dilations are sleeves of sensual being. I must speak in metaphor because words are sites of resistance, combustions of internal fire.

“Language is a reality,” Valéry further observed, “a usage of indeterminate coefficients.” A coefficient is a multiplicative factor in any term of a polynomial, a series or any expression. As soon as two or more words are brought into combination they multiply their associative power. Syntax is fundamentally a probability. A spoon is a prelude of refractory light. Each sentence is as structural as a lobster and sculptural as a rib. Call it a tapestry. Call it a comprehension. A consolidation. If it is a living sense it is because the mind has given it life.

The poet works at the frontier of nonsense. There is no incompatibility of words that some poet can bridge. The power to create new contextual significations is limitless. What initially appears to be nonsense can begin to make sense as soon as the mind discovers new relations among things. This is a rare ability, but one which can be developed. There will come a time when it will be impossible to exhaust the connotative resource of words. The greater the semantic distance among a group of words, the brighter the illumination.

If language had not been invented, what sound would you make to indicate the sun? How would you describe the sun? Nothing in life is predictable, except death and taxes. Everything else is up for grabs. Words inspire me to be a better addict. I agree with Baudelaire: one should always be drunk. Drunk on words, drunk on wine, drunk on virtue, drunk on poetry. However you choose.