Tell Me What It's LIke

Tell me what it’s like

To slap a Byzantine insistence

Into definition. You know? So that

I can understand it. The thrust

Of the alligator into the river

Is nothing less than a parable

Of itself looking for dinner

But what I meant to say is acoustical

Like the pulse of a violet sky

Dripping from my brain. The hand

Is evidence of fingers, but the squeeze

Of my arms around you is meant

To convince you that I like you

A lot and if I see a bug play a concertina

I will tell you about it with bells

And innuendo. I will suckle the light

From a headlight and make love to you

While gravity thickens around us

In prophecy and the world spins

Into Wednesday which is my favorite

Day of the week except for Thursday

Friday and Saturday. Monday is damaged

By walking around on Sunday

Waiting to happen. And Sunday

Is obviously unconcerned. Once

I heard a pharmaceutical occur

To my body and fill my mind

With abstraction. It made me want

To write you a letter and hang

Upside down. Someday I hope

To fill a kiss with your lips

Entangled in a thousand themes

Of reckless abandon. Watch me sway

With the wind. I like to float around

In my head like a world but does it

Have a jaw of gold? No but it squirts fog

Like a metaphor assembled for winter

Little Love Valves

I’ve had it with folding laundry. I’d rather seduce a push-up. Last night I saw Guillaume Apollinaire attack a wall and leave it trembling with closets. This inspired me. Even the drummers were nervous. But the drums, the drums were colossal. They gnashed at the air with sticks. Insights marched into representations of envy. We viewed the world differently. Everything seemed, suddenly, to exhale parentheses. Quiet intervals of private debauchery. Yodeling is now all the rage. This is how writing happens. A novel crawls into itself and percolates improbability. The density is large and red. Volume and area are frequented by pronouns. The pronouns behave irresponsibly and so bring about a state of crisis groaning with gasoline. Sparkling accommodates the cuticles of a river. Chronology collapses on itself. The narrative moves cautiously, slowly, like a high-wire funambulist crossing an abyss in a strong wind. For some reason this makes me think of sandpaper. The smell of a mahogany bar after spending an entire day rubbing it with sandpaper.

Picasso, for example, compensated for his lack of tactile feeling by drawing in air. That is, by constructing instead of modeling or yodeling.

The term “constructed” is how the Cubists were able to repair the damage done by the Impressionists.

And this is how I came to discover the certitude of mass in Puerto Rico. Hippies chewing water, magnolia leaves enveloping the attention of a Pomeranian.

You think I’m kidding? I’m not. Imagine a family of four grown men, one in bed with a sore throat, one dressed as an astronaut, one repeatedly tossing a baseball into a catcher’s mitt, and one with smallpox scars rehearsing for Hamlet. Life is seldom simple, and misleading evidence for William Huggins’s theory of nebulae being composed of luminous gas obscure our view of other galaxies. Banish Falstaff, but do not banish space.

I like propellers too much not to consider them as somehow allegorical.

Power, on the other hand, is essentially osteopathic. All the crustaceans scatter when I slam the door. I will, therefore, expand my activities to include sculpture and photosynthesis.

Everything changes when I choose to see the world in chiaroscuro. The immediate environment assumes an air of pagan urgency. I can embody an airport and dive for ancient Phoenician sweaters. I have a wild green tie that gallops across my chest like an expressway and a convocation of buttons I affectionately call my “little love valves.” None of this proves the existence of salt, but merits careful attention with a lemon-squeezer. The sky falls to the ground and breaks into a thousand knobs of luminous falsetto. What can go wrong?

I will admit that I prefer cellophane to aluminum foil. There’s a certain sorcery in the insistence of rain that speaks to my affinity for afterthought. Afterthought is vastly superior to forethought because Shelley’s Mont-Blanc creates an image of sublimity that continually hypostatizes an eternity of human consciousness. Forethought only reminds us to buy some laundry detergent.

For example, I can endure a parody of mathematics if it pulses with envy. Give me a shovel and I will dig for substitutes. This is how we come to discover that empire is soaked in ovals. And yes, I believe that the world is a fingerprint. How else can you explain the bounciness of pronouns, or the velvet underlining of a waterfall?

The map, they say, is not the territory. I get it. But isn’t it all a matter of corduroy and glue? Mountains exalt the twist of the highway. But the sugar puzzles our tongues with the candor of its sweetness, the multiplicity of its grains, the sensations exploding into symposiums of spectral congeniality the way elves do when they bounce through infinity enlivening the temperature of hindsight or get serious and determined and hammer chimerical ores out of hermetic Norwegian mines or get impromptu and wayward and descend booming furious rivers, drunk and exuberant, wild seething spumescences of locomotive actuation pushed hot and obvious into the sounds of Jack Kerouac’s teletype. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Words on a train. Acoustical, desperate, and strange.

 

 

Ghostly Horizon

There is a silk to listening. It’s a fine sensation. Words glide over the ears. Enter them sweetly in mild conversation. We live in a world of sensation. Snow and paper. Words pressed into paper with a pen. Light presses the face in August. Desires swarm in crisis like a circus. Acrobats catching one another. Horses riding sawdust plumed and muscular. Time thickens into raspberries, blackberries, textures crowded with shapes. There are contraptions available for space, rockets and cars. My personal space is filled with engines of personal prayer. I like to gather all the words I can find in the air and let them fall on your head. Can you feel them? Trickling down like the meat of an egg. Listen to the vowels of night. Listen to them seep into consonants and become delicate things, divine things, paraphernalia, diagrams, reality and its climates, its obstetrics and eyebrows, hunger and turnstiles. Let’s call it a milieu of bone. Of blood. Of sounds fossilized in abstraction. Fingers in a fist of ceremony. Cries of secretion. Intestines on a ceiling. The nightmare that is a job. That crushing boredom endured for money. Ok. Let’s not get to deep into politics. Do birds think of their feathers as equipment? I doubt it. Must be a terrific sensation to lift oneself into the air by flapping wings. Wonder how it feels if the joints get sore. Those old crows especially. The ones that look back at you with jaded eyes. Yes, I’m old. But I can still fly. Watch this. Flap, flap, flap. And he’s gone. But look: the world is secure in its grandeur. The thrashing of science, endless tubes and experiments, labyrinths and tests, dynasties of empirical thought grappling with the vertigo of eternity. Consciousness is exhausting. That’s why we have drugs. And food. Let’s take food: is food a drug? I feel a little addicted to eating. Put me anywhere near chocolate and I’m in serious trouble. Conflicted or fat. One of the two. Which is why I haven’t been to Scotland yet. It’s not the chocolate. It’s the whiskey. I know I’d feel compelled to go on tour drinking everything in sight. Again, it’s worth repeating, consciousness is exhausting. Shoving it onto paper is amusing sometimes. When experience gets organized into language it seems, I don’t know, like spatulas hanging in a kitchen. Velvet and lingerie. German is ponderous, isn’t it? That’s a heavy language. Not like French. French is nimble and light. More like water. It flows. Meanders. Reflects. Glitters back at the sun with hallucinatory jewels. Huge corridors filled with mirrors. Cultured pearls. I like it when the flowers agree to amuse us with their elegance and embroidery. The words traveling through my nerves are swollen, engorged with meaning and passion. I’m almost afraid to open my mouth and let them out. Certain veins of thought offer tricky diversions. I chip at the bas-relief of my pullulation and go wild. I will not impose this weight on you. Let’s just lean back and enjoy the autumn. Cook some noodles and watch them swirl. Just like words. Listen: the water is boiling. I can say anything now. I won’t pull back. I’ll dive right in. Honor these abstractions with toil. Montmartre and metaphysics. Construct a morning with the blood in my veins and stitch it to some ghostly horizon.

Feral Words

The signs employed in propositions are called rudders. They steer the mind, which would otherwise drift aimlessly, as it might do in an airport, or law office.

There are medications available for ataraxia, eudaimonia, euthymia, and upekkhā. The key word is for. These are medications in support of euphoric solutions to the nettles and thorns of life and appear in a variety of forms: ecstasy, codeine, dithyramb, dada. 

Most of my medication has a coefficient similar to Holland, which is why I’ve chosen to go through life explaining facelifts to the faithful and plunge my fingers into strange anatomies. Sometimes I grip the light in my hands dreaming of the heraldry of stars. But most of the time I stand around trembling like a soy bean. The mazurka deepens my appreciation of milk. I feel perforated and evident.

Happily there is a farm where we can dig for potatoes and become real men. I have a map of China and can run circles around a rusty sabbatical. Even the railroad flirts with abstraction from time to time. When the storm arrives we can elope. I’ve fallen in love with a clock. It’s a broken clock, but what does that matter? Time is an illusion. Let the local architecture thunder in solemn approval. There’s more to sketching a bewildered psychoanalysis than embarrassing a glove compartment with last minute propositions.

I search for power in the folds of a hog. Later I ruminate on the quantity of sweat this produces and lean over the balcony to study the crowd. A flock of words raises the highway from a delirious libido and puts it into a lithograph. The question is, whose words? Are these feral words? Are these the words of an aleatory abstraction or do they belong to a rogue arousal?

Let us suppose that the spine is a spiral staircase and that the lumber destined for paradise is pure dogma. Does this mean that states can be described but not named?

Yes.

I get the measles whenever I think about woodbine. You don’t know how sensitive I am. Pretty women torture me with hope. Yesterday I had my stitches removed. The sublime bends my blood into a speedboat. I’ve grown feathers. Meanwhile the Druids forage for old Beatles records. I stroll the waterfront enveloped in a solemn socialism. Even the gargoyles complement my exquisite grumpiness.

It is said, in these regions, that the structures of propositions stand to one another in internal relations. I have no reason to doubt this. Life scratches itself whenever it’s near a railroad. I say life as if it were my next door neighbor. Life is very close to me. I think, in many ways, that it is life that causes my fingers to itch and burn whenever I hold a proposition in my cupped hands and feel its little heart beat with controversy.

The world is the whole world. There is nowhere else to go. If Robert De Niro doesn’t make you feel better, I don’t know what to say. You might try licorice.

 

 

The Sentence as a Form of Crochet

What else can I do with this abstract ice, this jingle of bells, but be silent and enjoy it? A tall pink tower sparkles below these words. Whispers of cumbersome chronology help grease the gears of the elevator. I sometimes imagine the dead are trying to pull us into their realm. Could it be that Rome is even more wonderfully imperfect than at first imagined? I can feel something hopping around in my heart. Snakes and rapiers are more like axioms than gumdrops. But what is it that awakens the syllables of a warm farm crowded with shapes as the afternoon begins to lift itself into the air and a totem of vowels chatters its story of frogs and whales? Is it a big man doing delicate things, or a shiny Pythagorean pain? There is a meaning that seeps through these words and it would explain everything if I could only find it. I do know I prefer the sheets tucked in at the end of the bed but that doesn’t help explain the powers that are invisible to us, the splashes of divinity sweeping over our oars. Form is the beginning of consciousness. Touch is optional. Gnawing is acoustical. Conquest is rudimentary. The vast unfolding of a consummate ache renders one’s fingers more personal, more nimble of themselves as soon as one realizes that that inner pain, that inner hunger is riding a train through Texas. I’m totally into dumbbells. If my tongue is encumbered by a rabbit I accommodate its being and wrestle my incentives to the ground. I get up. I look around. And if the sun is still there I cheer the light and approve the playground slide. Raw essential being urges conference with a rhinoceros. I create holes in the air to escape from war. This causes art and stimulation. Darkness dangles like bats in a mouth of cabbage. I call this necromancy. But it doesn’t work. No dead people appear. Just Bob Dylan on a horse. Tinfoil is emotional. I feel its attractions whenever I smell a catalogue rotting in somebody’s garage. Maybe it’s best to leave the dead alone. I’ll be joining them one day, but for the meanwhile I’ll continue my cartwheels and sexy indiscriminate perceptions of singing. I saw Finland once, in a dream, which is the true geographic location of Finland. I saw the face of its deliverance, and huge fuzzy eyebrows on the faces of the men, and women so flashy and beautiful that my eyes unraveled in gold. It’s then that I realized that the universe is bigger than I initially thought and may be applied to the principles of the accordion, which goes in and out as one squeezes it, producing melodies and dilations of spirit. I can secrete anything I want. Ramification is something else. For that, we’ll need an engine and a large comfortable armchair. It’s time that we included our elbows in something. One can accomplish miracles in bas-relief. Opera stirs the senses. It’s here that we begin to feel a heavy fire in the growling air and let the sidewalk do its thing, just lay itself out in all that concrete, allowing us to abandon our oars and luxuriate in the sweetness of incantation.

On Getting Old

Existence grows in weight as one ages. It’s as if lived phenomena accumulated like alluvial deposits in a river and cemented into lithological regrets. Disillusionments, terminations, humiliations, hallucinations, chagrins, manias, aversions, divisions, conflicts, chaos, rocks.

Wrinkles don’t help. Nor does arthritis. Drugs, sometimes. Nevertheless, marvels continue: snow, electricity, the universe.

One discovers a subversive elegance in some of the uglier aspects of life. Beauty belongs to the young. Old age finds consolation in being less subject to the tyrannies of beauty. By the time one has reached one's sixties, one has experienced enough loss, mortality, sickness, treachery, duplicity, and disappointment to realize what a true comedy human existence can be, albeit not a particularly funny one.

I watched a video on YouTube of Willie Nelson in 1962 sing “Crazy” to a television audience and marveled at how much his appearance has changed. In 1962 he was 29, a young man on the threshold of maturity. His hair was lush and red and impeccably combed. He looked like a cross between Liberace and Kirk Douglas. Now in his eighties, he is more fully himself. His face is weathered and craggy and his hair, which is still lush and red but tinged with gray, spills over his shoulders. He looks like an outlaw of the old weird American west. He’s a perfect example of how the losses that come with the passage of time become fruitions, chrysalis and increase. The richest sounds come from a battered guitar. And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

I have often heard people in their sixties and seventies remark that they feel the same as when they were eighteen. I can understand that. At 68, I feel that way myself. I like the same music and have the same tendencies toward wild, crazy behavior. I also know what the repercussions of that behavior feel like and are much harder to bear in old age. I remember hangovers in my forties that felt like warmed over death. I also know that when I enter a room the heads of young ladies don’t turn to look fetchingly upon my wrinkled skull, the one with the little hairs growing out of my ears. I didn’t have an enlarged prostate at age 18, which causes me to hold up lines to the urinal in the men’s room, nor a paunch or big fuzzy eyebrows or liver spots. My future at 18 offered a grand panorama of options and possibilities. At 68, I’m invited to look over cremation and burial opportunities.

So no, life at 68 doesn’t feel quite the same as it did at 18. Although, occasionally, it does. And when I see Mick Jagger leaping about on a stage in his seventies with greater energy and nimbleness than he did in his early twenties, I don’t know what to think. Is he just making it look that way, or is it possible that in some fashion we actually can grow younger as we get older? Existence does feel heavier. But it also feels much more mortal and temporary, and that extra sense of ephemerality does something to the spirit, inflates it with hot, euphoric glee.

An Elevator Door Opens

An elevator door opens. Out steps an abstraction dressed in handsprings. What this means is sensation, keen sensation, exquisite sensation, the language of fish and chips and dreams trickling puddles of reflection on Sunday mornings. The delicate noises of Cézanne’s marvelous life.

Please somebody help me. I’m drowning in ovations. Or are they evasions? What I meant to say is that the salt in a Martian’s ear is inherently lyrical. But I don’t think you need me to tell you that. What was it you needed me for? Would you like me to tell you about pain? Pain is an indecent confusion that apparels us in lightning in the ancient gardens of the mind.

What a strange smell. Is that you? When one’s nerves are birds the world begins spinning. And smelling. You know that smell when you open a can of tuna? That’s the smell. It reminds me of fish and death and the merciless ambling of a black conviction spread by the paragraph of a dark, slow voice producing cleavage and oysters in a cocktail lounge somewhere in Alabama.

What’s your favorite emotion? Mine is ripping the sky apart and standing on a star outside of time.

It is the job of the house to mingle itself with cracks.

My understanding of Seattle has expanded to include Tangiers. This makes everything vertiginous and wide. I’ve never been overly fond of horizontality. There are horses in me that want the wide open spaces of a piece of paper. Anguish is just the flip side of oblivion. There’s a certain ooze that confirms this, and a stranger arriving in town whose eyes are evocations of pink. With a little spit and varnish he can be made to look like anybody, even Carl Sandburg.

It is the destiny of puppets to dangle from strings and climax in diphthongs. This is how I managed to arrive in Cincinnati just in time to rupture a scruple. I got tangled in my strings but when I discovered autonomy available in the G minor of a violin sonata by Franz Schubert I took full advantage and tripped lightly into an elevator that took me all the way to Point Hope, Alaska.

If all else fails, you can always rely on circumlocution. Some people call it bullshit. Me, I like to think of it as a random migration of thought trembling under a vast spectrum of improbability.

This is where the adjectives come in: gluttonous, exquisite, revitalizing, ebullient, jovial, carefree, playful, buoyant, and drastic. Everything The House of Destiny should be: open, aberrant, original, eccentric, bottomless, topless, immeasurable, peculiar, and odd.