Propinquity

Climbing offers its own form of hunger. Impossible luxuries circulate among us. I found a brochure of simulacrums behind the sun. Today I’ve decided to walk across various structures in imprudent thrusts of silence. I’ve met others at the end of the road with a similar vision. We get dressed in bikinis and necklaces of owl and robin skulls. I found a calliope in a dead salmon. It makes a powerful analgesic. It spits tambourines like an amphetamine and knits kneecaps for our parables. I hover with wonderment over a premonition in the sand. Where did that come from? I can verify its length if I can have a leather vest and an airplane.

Revelations don’t come easy. Sometimes you have to go into the jungle and commit an act of doorjamb. Wrinkled sounds obscure the work of worms. Sweat illustrates the narcissism of propulsion. The rain pours its subtleties on my fingernails. It’s necessary to construct an opposition to epilepsy. The nerve is an effective device for ruminating on the color brown. It will help you obtain a modulation. Touch your pony with a breath of kindness. That will help you to process Japan. Grammar leaves its blisters on a musical disease.

The morality of birch is difficult to maintain. It consists of climbing the mountains and interceding with space. I caress the birds within my feeling. Rags of cloud partially obscure the skull of evening. No one knows for sure what is about to happen. All that we know for sure is spaghetti. Most of the recipes are a patchwork of sauce and noodles. What do you think of cement? I think it demonstrates the solidity of tradition. People walk. It’s how people walk that you’ve got to pay attention to. That, and dangling prepositions. Never dangle a preposition unless you mean to invite an endocrine gland to a funeral home. I’m just simply not up to that sort of thing anymore. I like precision. I like arrowheads and swallow-tailed coats. Sometimes a little ambiguity to season the sauce.

The chimney ascends as cob. I grab another rock and pull myself up, saluting the irregularities as friends, and writing a letter when a zip code flies by. Sometimes I rely on cause and effect, and sometimes buttonbush and microfilm. Either way, the lemon meringue cries out in anguish.

Friction ferments on the surface of a sand flea. Exploration is absorbed by the gut in the River of Runes. We feel what flows through us. By us. Over us. In us.

Contrasting depths spit lava. We talk about drills and stupefactions. A young woman produces a violin and begins to play it. I hear a sonata for violin in A major by George Fredric Handel. The wind falls on the rocks and Cubism bends the river into bubbles. Complications follow, but we stomp on them, laughing until the fire is out. During the night, we play cards. The lantern glows softly. Not enough to obscure the stars. We can see Orion’s belt. I discard two cards and pick two more: the ace of spades and the king of hearts.

I call the rain and it slouches forward getting everything wet. I send it back. It’s not my rain. It belongs to someone else. Then a wind comes followed by as musical ensemble singing classics in the snow. I go inside myself briefly to see what’s going on. Abstractions tumble on a canvas. I look up my sleeve and find a sledgehammer. There’s a cafeteria in my shoe. Sometimes, the best plan of action is no action at all. And so I sit down on my favorite chair and wrestle with my ambitions. There are implications in ink that cannot be reproduced by usury. Age is not a metaphor. It’s an enterprise.

A pair of moccasins carry a woman over the river, swaying like the grease of independence. Her name is Driftwood Sally and she’s married to a clarinetist named Punch. They own a garage in Saint Louis. I know nothing about cars except that they have pistons and gears and move by combustion. This is not the same as carrots, which are an artistic concept. Nature is full of postcards. All you have to do is look around. Mister Turpentine honks at a bronchial soliloquy and sneezes quarks of aromatic gin. The color green was constructed precisely for this species of experience. Alcohol was invented for drunkenness. Drunkenness was invented for redemption. Redemption was invented for survival. Survival was invented for clarinets.

A body of water collapses into the earth and calls itself a lake. A nearby stand of mahogany may be more easily understood as a form of interrelationships than governmental autonomy. The vivacity of potential sleeps among the balloons. An ocean of predicates falls out of a cash register and begins a relationship with a causeway. Things begin to seem a little multilateral, even slippery. If silence is gold then socialism is tin. Bacteria cry out for deeper understanding. There is more to life than squash. There is also concretion and glue. Let’s stick together people.

And yes. It’s true. I like swimming. Swimming is the answer to questions of virtue. There is virtue in swimming. It keeps us afloat and is a form of propulsion.

I like the feeling of sand beneath my feet. I like being surrounded by water. There’s water inside my body. There’s water outside my body. I’m at one with the medium. Water wrinkles. Skin wrinkles. Everywhere there is water there is flowing and waves. Pullulation, salvation, and empty glass bottles. Equilibrium, portholes, and Hawaiian guitars.

How can you lose?

Nobody loses. Everybody wins in the end. And you know what that means: propinquity.  

 

 

 

Day of the Prune

I like to gather delicate things. Anything. So long as it’s delicate, symbolic, and glass. Perception is a process so strangely is there something behaving until it becomes a bakery. I walked through postulation lifted and here I am. I’m the weather. Snow falls on my hand and the afternoon threads a shiny pain until it knocks on the door. What do you do when reality is injured? Distance does currents and dots drip on a map of my heart. Movement is the fertility of experience creeping slowly across the ooze of learning. People are irritating. I think of kelp. It helps. Appeal appeals and is appealing. That, too, and the bakery causes itself by rubber. Writing is always a warrior yelling in battle. Cement is worship. If we reflect on glowing we are a people of ink. I suckle a headlight in the greenhouse and cage a little alligator in my prophecy. I feel most palpable when a cloth enhances hope, which is to say coffee squeezing a moon with my subtleties contoured to look like syntax. And we all know what a push up is. Scatter these words in your mind and wave to me from a farm. I will coagulate. I am stretched into you like a long abalone on a lone night in Tuscaloosa. I am a color walking in bones. I will sell you an odor for one dollar but you must choose the scent. I will start this sexual incense notwithstanding. I am not with standing I am pulling a dream out of the taste of hail. I come to compose this despite the power to chirp, which is easier, but less effective. If I fill a suitcase with enough injuries I can get dressed in a hothouse Picasso and feel its rags sag into air. And so my statements are not the same as strolling, I know this, it’s riveted to a big construction, gnarled as an oak and wet as veins. So this makes it that a ship is rope and not as disturbing as lightning shooting from the mouth of the dishwasher. His name is Walt and he likes science, Arizona, and towels. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Consciousness is exhausting. It’s really so much easier to bless one’s shoes with quietude and go swimming anyway. I think of music and don’t really mean a house. I’m just energy, you know? I do like immediacy and ghosts and antiques. I like willow and exploration. Writing is better when it’s catching a taxi then when it’s remembering miniskirts. But that’s just a useless generality. Don’t listen to me. I smell like an ice cube. I float in my head like a world and hope someday to whistle. But really, when you think about it, frogs are as stunning as dumbbells, and I’m an eel like anyone else, a phoneme languishing in prunes.

Shaken Shape of Midnight

Shaken shape of midnight. A hive broadcasts the room. It’s hard that our rattles are a piece of soap. The bruise is breathing in veins of rose to blue. I butter my resilience. Ointment is my prompt. Chemicals won’t blossom flipped in a mattress. Hallucinations huddle into what riveted depth. Trouble is an emotion so big it occurs orthogonal. Clay is a way to begin to shiver. An exhibition convinces drawing an ocean is abandoned by beads. Opinion incarnates a dump from candles. Clatter wears the eyes except sleep if a giant moody vapor becomes a flower and vagueness becomes an architecture. The motion authorizes rising green and the carving goes in air to lip into fights hanging by including bugs. My clothes are in a yell to hit a sternum. The rationalizations are like quarks in the intestine of a desire. I feel the need to knock on a mosquito with trees. The paradigm rattles a world the hunger turned bubbly with oaths. My appearance plunged in a bistro at simple needs. Definition has a magnetic old Cubist chair dreaming eyes of the morning. A crowd of words huddle at my window of rain. The appeasement of squeezing glides through thought. Wrap the pickle. I hear the sound of my life holding a kitchen sink. Locomotive groans under the weight of alchemy. Corot strains shrewdly to transcend the sky in crisis. I’m sanguine as pepper. I feel the silence of this abstract ice is correspondent to a tall pink tower if the paragraph throbs like a cherry in apprehension of itself. Implication is considered to become a waterfall. I continue to make the sound of sympathy on a harmonica. A hunchbacked goldfish is harnessed to these words. Silk is a word incarnate in the arabesques of a single blue orchid. The grebe falls suddenly and plunges into the water. The savor of mayonnaise is hypothetical with eggs. My cynicism crackles among my fingers. The silk of listening necessitates thought. Focus on a hit song and eternity will attract thinking. Pounce out when this occurs. I give my hat to the wet oddity pressing my pencil into description. This is called an iguana. Temptation tilts a fence. We live life differently in glory. Beyond the acceptance of compost is your opening the mouth into the invocation. Act softly if feeling gets naked. Things convey pummeling by form, and drills and cradles are a paradox. This is called brocade. Call it dissonance. Affirm this flare into yanking what this ancient garden produces in the sky. The distance provides enough theorem for the nerves to make pronouns. There is a sensation from the evocation of meaning that we recognize spreading in hypothesis. There are thumbs among the pages of metaphysics. We flourish in the prodigality of talk. We flutter in closets. We enrich our glasses with ugly towels. The phantoms crumble under the absorption and vault beside the driveway. Protein clenches our mohair. We walk in a cloud of butterflies. The sentence circles itself in cream. Birds are everything. I moo in phenomenon. I feel the ghost of a dream throwing a rivet up to the eyes in a wilderness of feeling. I heft it onto paper and ponder space, ripping feeling to shreds of Cézanne. Language is affectionately being alive to the splutter of stars.

Soup du Jour

Eyes eat words. We know this. You might compare rain to music, but there it is. Élan vital. I don’t manage problems. I avoid them. The subjunctive is too frail for winter. Ask Gertrude Stein. Ask experience. If there’s a flying saucer in my soup, I don’t complain. I climb aboard. Words are for the doors of the mind, it’s true, but I sweat a lot when I run. I need a whirlwind of words. I like to talk in fables. If blood is a form of ink I will need a shovel. The candor of the climate is very like a whale. Tugs share qualities of endurance. Hair is an enigma. I don’t know what to say about grease. There are butterflies on the seashore this morning. Sobs of envy assassinate a shark. The sky dribbles its shadows. We get lost in a library of reckless obscurity and find an angel of the morning dreaming of eyes. There’s blood on my sleeve. My hydrometer is broken. I’m all elbows. There is a feeling in me that wants to squeeze things. I think the railroad blooms on its rails so that a world is sublime if it provides transport. If I gaze at something in idleness I see it as a gift. I saw a man repair a ceiling fan in a garage and wondered how one might define pain. Variations of it seethe in obscenity when we’re alone. A soft, somewhat mournful timbre repeating phrases in the lower octave echoes the weary fulminations of the car wash. A piece of grappled cardboard arrives in perception. We must use stilts to adapt to the turnstiles. Go, solicit a discarded color. Autumn is to a cup of infinity what infinity is to paste. The thermometer eats a blister. I play with balls and yell at their physiology. This is how I became a lawyer. I found a personality at a newsstand. Eczema was not made for abhorrence so much as assembly. I’m afraid of asking what a noun is and then it comes to me just as the parade begins and I smile. Here I am forming a conclusion, then losing it again. I get my keys out and start the car. This refrigerated space would cheer any blob of emotion into further definition. I see it as infantry and illusionism and add inches to the climate of shameless combing which has no puffing if there are pumpkins available for allegory. If the speedometer flies out of time and extends it to you as a saucer then talking about it requires tea. I feel a long warm swim arrive. Concentration is the dirt in which I submit a demand for shape and get a watermelon. Ever since I began this regime of medicine the world has been a bashful texture. Hallucination?  Yes, that too. I pull a bombarded eye toward whatever attracts a deepened etymology. It is as if a ghost clanked by like a Cubist, dropping monsoons and straw. The intrigue of touch holds an empire. That metal expanding into space is my ransom. I pullulate as if I were dripping words. A raw sienna topples onto the jungle. I pull a light from the darkness and feel its warmth in my hand. Tickling is configurational. If laughter is a fence it’s equally heavy that a separation widens the punch. New studies of pepper season the philosophy of salt. The chains ascend easily and go beserk. The ocean begins swelling when the words are dry. I sometimes use English to describe a lobster for the tourists. It’s a living. I’m going to drink five coffees and dangle from a sentence like an odyssey of syntax.  A great many intentions are a color that I flex into mind. The hachure is fine. But nothing beats anguish. Blood trickles from a mail box and lights up Spain, causing beauty and Joan Baez.

Cardigan Satori

Each day I wear a dark grey cardigan which is so worn out I only wear it at home. If I wear it in public I make sure it’s going to be covered by a jacket. There’s a single strand of wool hanging from the right sleeve in a squiggle of care-free disrepair. There are big holes in each armpit. And even when I manage to get the sweater buttoned correctly it looks lopsided. One side appears dignified and even while the other side droops in a half-hearted sabotage.

I’ve got two other cardigans, but their wool is thicker and heavier. I prefer to wear the worn cardigan around the house because it’s lighter and keeps me warm without being bulky or overly consequential. It’s more of a pleasant afterthought, a modest addition.

The other two cardigans are for more formal occasions, going to dinner or attending a violin concerto. Anything that would require taking my coat or jacket off. Otherwise I just go with the old used cardigan and its threadbare eccentricities.

I keep the nicer cardigans in the bedroom closet. One is black and one is brown. I never choose one or the other. It’s usually too dark to tell which one is brown and which one is black. I just reach in and feel around for wool. As soon as I feel something that feels like wool in a tight thick weave I pull it out. It might be the black cardigan and it might be the brown cardigan. It doesn’t make a difference. They both go with anything I wear.

I wish all my choices were that easy.

I’ve heard that some people get depressed when, due to wealth or power, their range of options grows large. You can’t enjoy everything at once. Choose one thing and you exclude another. It’s a continuous frustration, a recipe for chronic dissatisfaction.

The Buddhists are right. Desire is often a source of pain. It keeps us attached. The only real freedom is to somehow neutralize the power of desire.

Easier said than done.

It does get easier with age. Nature helps. Hormones lose their tyrannous power. Personal loss takes its toll and adds perspective. Life takes on the look of a used cardigan. A strand of wool hanging loose in a squiggle of “why not?” acceptance.  

The Dream of a Hammer

I’m easily seduced by solitude. Give me a troposphere with a folio of implications and I’m happy. I will depart more quickly if the noise of these mechanisms called words aches with geometry and blossoms into diagrams, or leopard moths. Once the allocution happens I can cut to red squirrels and start the turboprop. Meet me at the hotel and I will give you an open-faced sandwich. Max Jacob will be there with his waves and dominoes. The windows are delicious curiosities of glass and exhalation. I savor the trembling of their drool as they respond to the power of fog. The dream of a hammer stirs a fugue of blood to warm my fingers on the rim of a chair. The world leans against the universe chewing a sandwich of Venetian blinds. The drapery is much too personal. But what can you do? There’s no way to drop the pretense of a universe based on curtain rods. I will sit amid the crockery feathering a peck of uvula.

        What happens to butter if you ignore it? Does it remain in a cube or does it assume the shape of a syllable and form an oath of stoves? I will tell you this: this is how the universe strains to become an orthogonal coin in the pocket of a preposition. I will sometimes see a slice of pie do the very same thing aboard a ship of smears. I’m not talking just any smears either. I mean the really greasy ones, with unfulfilled forms and refractory coefficients. I anticipate heat and bruises. Sometimes when I feel aloud and sparkly I tap on an oak tree with my rapier and fish for compliments. The sublime isn’t a mere gesture, it’s a whole voyage. It presses against the sky until it breaks into little pieces of syntax. I often have trouble writing pamphlets for the Society of Berserk Elopements but each time I plead for the betterment of indentation generalities flame from my mouth and scorch the furniture.

Acceptance houses the roar of coherence. Please extend my thanks to the rain. Sometimes a simple banishment will murmur its exultation at a library before falling asleep on somebody’s homework. Perception glitters with trays. Athletes tumble through the arugula. The new supply of masks is a hit. Cubism thrives. My advice is to leave the plant where it is. If the cat jumps over it again we can move it into this sentence I’ve written for it. My vertebrae have begun percolating the great outdoors. I have a tendency to carry nouns to the very edge of meaning and then water them with adjectives.

Please allow me to demonstrate how the snow falls. It falls quietly, steadily, beautifully, like a harmonica or desk. Hills of oak and aspen flow through the wires of a sip of power I call cookie. Which is really just a drink of fish. I’m beside myself with opera. I have a dog named Moose and a moose named Dog. The ring on my finger is the eyeball of a giant squid mounted in a little bucket of shaved ice. My arms are full of congeniality. My legs are glazed with thumps of tiny respect. I feel sexual as a hog on National Public Sleeping Day. We must get together and talk about cement and gravity and other phenomena that crawl or turn into blobs of expectant nipple. Look at me. I’m shaking. I feel the glow of embarkation. And I have nowhere to go. Except where I am. Except where I am.

Concert

Yesterday Roberta and I went to hear a concert given at the Queen Anne Christian Church. A coworker had two extra tickets which he shared with us. Ingrid Matthews played a violin made by Hendrik Jacobs of Amsterdam, Holland, in 1703, and was periodically accompanied by John Lenti who played a theorbo built by Klaus Jacobsen of London, England, in 1985, based on a model by built by Matteo Sellas of Venice, Italy, in 1640. They performed music of the baroque era. This included a Sonata in D minor for violin and continuo by Philipp Friedrich Böddecker, a Partita in A minor for unaccompanied violin by Johan Paul von Westhoff, a Fantasia in B-flat major by Georg Philipp Telemann, a Passacaglia in G minor for unaccompanied violin by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, an Aria from Rinaldo by George Frideric Handel, a Sonata in A minor for unaccompanied violin by Johann Sebastian Bach and a Sonata in D major for violin and continuo by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer.

The intricacy of Ingrid Matthew’s playing was nothing less than stupefying. How is it possible to remember so many nuances, so many rapid passages and throbbing vibratos? At one point the violin seemed to be producing two separate sounds simultaneously.

I was greatly amused by Ingrid’s black sequined blouse. It flashed and scintillated while she played and seemed to provide a visual accompaniment to her playing.

I wish I could describe what she played. But I don’t have the vocabulary or knowledge. I’ve never played an instrument. I still don’t know what an octave is. Many people have explained it to me. I’ve looked it up in music books and Wikipedia. But the concept still eludes me. And that’s just an octave. I wouldn’t know an arpeggio if I tripped over one, or the difference between a major and a minor. I’ve seen musicians twist pegs and pluck and strum and cock their ear and twist the pegs and pluck and strum again and again until the tone sounded correct to them. Nothing sounded different to me. They clearly heard something that I did not.

Which is why I’ve never been invited to play for the Rolling Stones or entertain my quiet moments with a song and a little piano playing. I can do none of these things. It’s frustrating. Because I love music.

What I did hear during Ingrid Matthew’s performance were patterns of sound that were pleasing to the ear, intriguing in their complexity and flair, but something far more than that, something less obvious, a phenomenon so fine and transcendent it seemed miraculous that anyone could produce it without levitating. No doubt that’s why musicians always seem different when they’re playing music. They seem transported. Entranced.

My chosen instrument is language. Words. I sense a keen music inherent in language. But I can’t even describe that. I don’t have the words available to tell you what words do when they deliver the goods, crash out of the tyranny of convention to achieve something new, something incandescent and boundless. Something akin to music.