The Smell Of Heat On Marble

A shy hip provides an almanac. Candle language. Drama driven by feeling open. The wind elf satisfies the monastery. Go summer lift the puddle to sparkle.

Begin a walrus muscle plaster. Bear kite memory that hovering is a body of mist. A neglecting season of notebook encounters. Radical swell for a cave of noble pedestrians. Thoughtful need for a planet that forges magnets of Nevada sage.

Fill up the redeeming career time with basement toys. I hope that a sad poplar will be born on the border. Hollow are the words of algebra. Run to the agate bandage and think of a design for the beauty of indecision. My arms swing the world in muslin it's lush and swirling and hitting our prayers with black shadows.

Wire for a map of pain. Palm underneath the weight of its own existence. Slip it where the mat is chained to propagation. The bear implies an embassy of onions, a turpentine Sunday opposite the reach of radar. The plumage of writing flows vague and verdant above the sleep of Big Sur where cypresses whisper philosophies of dirt to the sailing heavens and ants swarm the hills like famished opticians.

Climate caresses the wrinkles of the sea’s evident wish to create sensation, which is presumed to be assuagement, a solace for the traction of time. Wellness logs hover over the mucus of feudalism. Shadow plumage is drama, the narrative equivalent of starting a circus. Asia’s dream of an antenna tangle. Dagger spade needle soak.

And then he kissed me. He kissed me in a way I’d never been kissed before. The house, meanwhile, drinks its coherence from a cup of visibility. Visibility has a strong taste, a bit like Madagascar at twilight, or a banana split in Laramie, Wyoming, at about 7:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening in late July or early August. Opinions stroll through the glaze of a distilled squint resulting in hawks.

This means that roots offer religious truths and paper. Anarchy seduces the Prince of Eggnog and gets naked in reincarnation. Incense hugs the distinction. The story proceeds by writing itself into tarantulas and performing a tarantella on the kitchen stove, which is distracted by an overhead fan. Infinity pauses to bark.

Bee rock browsed in a fever no one would tear up in a million years. Saucy astronomy. Cricket attic cantata muscle. Emotional vibrations rippling in an irrigation ditch. Thermometer during novels written in food budget randomness.

Meaning is sometimes a pillow in which I hear time splashing its hands on a sandstone nose. Sadness sloth. Conflagration twirling. Gun kitten gentle geometry. Prickly prose available for ebullient mustache hunts.

The tongue stirs streams of words which go into the air and do things. The little king lowers himself on a knee below the awning and anoints a knuckle. I worry about the blatant kit of hoping to go fast in a field today. The hot melt to flex a drinking noise. The border has trees and yet a lazy pin is overflowing the image of itself.

When somebody does you a wrong, do you stay out all night long getting drunk, or do you fold yourself into a prayer and roll into the soft oblivion of sleep? Don’t be mean. Don’t lose your balance. Stay home. Squeeze something.

Is it getting better? Gray reason echoes a background of stars and hangs from yesterday, a hum of sonic jewelry. Time is a tenable crust, a shoulder of sun, a street for walking around in pants. Dramatic ripple of well-being that pops into drapery and lets the light come in and destroy the obscurity of fear. Meanwhile I'm sitting here waiting for you to enter my dream.

Flooding metal will want to solder socialism together with symptoms of resurrection. Avoid the north and be a mouth to the table. Habitat stool of milky history, abrupt and wet as a jellyfish. Undertake a beautiful ash, a wagging chameleon handwriting, and multiply. The mohair clarifies the ribbons by an aberrant speculation based on coffee.

Choose a muscle, choose a bone. Take a soldier, take a king. I will be waiting in the hallway. My shoes want to go somewhere. The pronouns are at it again, bending the world to their purpose.

Well, it happens. One must compose oneself. Combine hopping with hoping, imminence with immanence, thyme with time. And there is always sand, always some form of motion to be performed, thumbs raised, gardens tilled, wonders to behold. The sad beautiful clock of the backbone, the embroidery of winds on sandstone.

I undressed my beard bow and threaded the breast of morning with the gospel of nothingness. The cathedral puddle will help us find the consonants we need to soothe our nerves. The swell in the paper is a benevolent face. It appears when sunlight enhances the hardware the elves have so craftily arranged on the table and the face of the sky begins talking about France, each lip a tumble into charm. The weight of the sand will indicate that the weight of the oysters has been splashed by too much ocean, which is what the fingers expand as soon as we enter the waves, and so must be entered into our records, numbers full of wool, creosote falsettos.

It is the force of the wind to be smashed up to the mound. Accidental pedestrian kettles make it feel like a diving board. The process is also a form of sigh, an admission that words occur like sounds in a forest not of my own making. Sauerkraut and radar are enigmatic forms of fez. Carry the planet to the barn where we can get a better look at it.

My nerves belong to sapphire. I'm lazy that's true it’s a theory of hope. Feeling is for making noise. The garden’s distress is dazzling at the top of the pool. The smell of heat on marble is soft as the memory of well-being, and so becomes an occupation, a sport like baseball, but with more pauses, more mustard, more hanging around the dugout.

Getting Weird On 6th Street

I remember taking a bath in a dilapidated house on Balbach Street in San Jose, circa 1973. It didn’t have a shower. Just a tub. I remember languishing there in the water, a little amazed that warm water could feel so good, when a mouse appeared. I looked at the mouse. The mouse looked at me. It was just that. A simple acknowledgment. The mouse scampered off and I never saw him again. I don’t think I’ve taken a bath since then. I prefer showers. I like the feeling of water hitting my body. It’s like getting splattered with punctuation, semicolons and commas. I come out of the shower feeling clean and grammatical. The narrative that is my life continues with little pauses and thoughtful hesitations. I like to drink time in small shots. None of my memories are all that big. I don’t remember being born at all. Does anybody? What kind of memory would that be, assuming anyone could remember that? One minute it’s dark, the next minute the world is huge and bright and people are looking at you, everybody smiling at your entrance.

Whatever happened to Bobby Darin? Funny, I never really got into that guy, but he did put out a lot of great music. “Dream Lover.” That’s a good one.

“Please Mr. Postman.” The Marvelettes. Gladys Horton, Katherine Anderson, Georgeanna Tillman, Wanda Young.

Things I have lost over time: my temper, my youth, my parents, my illusions, my direction, my patience, my innocence, a little incentive, a little hubris, two habits, three molars, one incisor, five jobs, two cats, eight theories, nine callings, seven thick glazes, four cars, countless socks, my train of thought, a Who ticket, and a pet rock named Slim.

I also lost a planet, but it wasn’t my fault. I blame capitalism.

“Take Me To The River.” Al Green. October, 1974. That was the year my dad drove me back to my studio apartment in San José. He took a sudden turn to the left off I-5 and headed west on Highway 26 which both surprised and annoyed me. I was eager to get back home and complete a paper on James Joyce’s Ulysses. He was like that. He’d get in a car and take turns on impulse. He liked looking at things. Landscapes especially. He liked taking pictures. It was also the year of the gas crisis and Kohoutek Comet. We’d stop along Highway 101 overlooking the rocky Oregon coast and looked west trying to search out what might be a comet. We never did see it. We spent the night at a motel in Coos Bay. The gas gauge was on empty. We got up early and checked out of the motel. I spotted a phone booth and phoned the state patrol for information about a nearby gas station that might be open. They didn’t have that information. There was nothing else to do but leave, or become residents of Coos Bay until the gas crisis was resolved. Happily, we found a gas station open on the outskirts of town. I finished my paper on Ulysses, my dad returned to Seattle, and Kohoutek became a song by the German band Kraftwerk called "Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie."

“Miss You.” Rolling Stones. May, 1978. I hated disco, but I’ve always really liked this song. It has a bluesy core. You get the coke scene and leisure suits and mirror ball decadence of that era, but with a nasty, visceral bass line and Richards’s open G tuning, it’s not just a song, it’s an attitude.

“Heart of Glass.” 1979. Another disco song that I liked. Can’t explain why. I just like it.

The most exciting thing about 1979 was that it was the end of the boring 70s. I had entered my 30s. Jimmy Carter gave his “Crisis in Confidence” speech, which I agreed with, we had more than an energy crisis, America was destructively materialistic, we had a moral and spiritual crisis, hard to believe now an American president would say such a thing, but he did, and I dug it, but the country didn’t, not at all, Carter and his sweet Georgia smile got booted out and in 1980 we got Ronald Reagan as president and thirty years of ecocide and obesity and consumerism on a grotesque scale that hasn’t diminished in the slightest but swelled like a dead body in a murky pestilential river.

1979 was the year my dad chartered a bus and invited a bunch of people to go see the total solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. We boarded the bus near midnight. It looked like a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the with Donald Sutherland, which came out the previous year. I didn’t sleep. We arrived at about six o’clock. I brought a shoebox with a pinhole in it to view the eclipse. But as soon as it began to occur and the earth went from blue sky morning back to night and waves of darkness undulated over the grassy knoll and dogs and birds all went silent and I heard oohs and aahs from people I turned around and saw the blackest hole I’d ever seen with little scintillating golden beads around the rim.

I stop during my afternoon run to talk to a neighbor, a guy about my own age, about the horrors and weirdness of everything. He has the same sense of dread and derealization as R and I, a mega-maniacal North Korean dictator with a weird haircut throwing missiles into the ocean and threatening war and holocaust, a broken Federal government, a president with the intellect and behavior of a five-year old, ethics completely missing from all levels of culture, but especially healthcare, doctors have become crooks, the weird sudden scarcity of birds, R says the morning used to ring with the chatter of birds but lately there’s been nothing, few insects, dead bees littering the sidewalks, it’s spooky. I get going, my friend goes back to packing his car for a trip to Salt Lake City, which reminds of a trip R and I made to Boulder, Colorado in 1995, listening almost exclusively to the Cocteau Twins there and back, Allen Ginsberg giving an impromptu talk in a big white tent on the Naropa campus, discoursing brilliantly and vigorously on William Blake and Urizen, the idea that the hyper-rational mindset of the technocratic juggernaut that emerged from the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution had become destructive, so solidified that it didn’t allow for any feeling or generosity of imaginative space, all during a raging lightning storm that slapped up against the Rockies, I worried about lightning running through the microphone cords and lighting Ginsberg into a ball of St. Elmo’s fire. That same week the New Yorker magazine had Ginsberg on the cover, holding a pen to a lightning bolt.

1992. I’m ending a shift at the mailing service where I’ve been working for almost two decades, I have my hand on the doorknob, the radio is playing, I’m about to turn the knob and enter the soothing night air when I hear the opening chords to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and stop dead in my tracks. Wow. What’s this I wonder. I pause at the door and give it a listen. It’s the first song I’ve heard in about 23 years that’s got me excited about music, that hasn’t sounded corporate or swaggering and steeped in the gym-sock stench of hypermasculinity. Hell of a song that guy wrote. Kurt Cobain. Took a lot of pain and made something beautiful out of it.

R was right. All the hotel rooms in the swath of the solar eclipse that will happen on August 21 at about 10:25 a.m. in western Oregon have been rented. Some hotels have canceled reservations so they can charge more money for the rooms, some as high $1,000 per night.

Shit. R tells me she told me about the eclipse a year ago. I don’t remember that. I must’ve been obsessing about something else at the time. Why didn’t it register? Fuck me. I must’ve had a total eclipse of the brain.

There’s another one in 2024. We can see it in Austin or San Antonio, Texas. Or Mexico. But will I still be alive? Will there still be a planet? Seven years is a long time. I can’t imagine a Texas seven years from now. I can’t imagine a United States seven years from now. An Alamo. An Arkansas. A Utah. A Trail of Tears. Bats. Armadillos. BBQ. Getting weird on 6^th Street. Willie Nelson. Dixie Chicks. Big Bend. Marfa. Chicken shit bingo on Sunday night.

Backpack

Took my small black backpack with me running this afternoon, stuck my wallet into it, and stopped by the Fiver Corners Hardware store to get a quarter-inch Allen wrench. There was no single Allen wrench. A small collection of Allen wrenches was sold in a package. It was only four bucks so I bought it. When I got back home I got under the kitchen sink and tried twisting the nut under the garbage disposal, which had frozen. Nada. I couldn’t get it to move a bit. I put everything back. Unplugged the disposal unit. We never use it anyway. Which is probably how it got frozen.

8:04 p.m. I listen to the Stones sing “Cry to Me,” which is credited to Burt Russell and was first released in 1961 by Solomon Burke. Then “Out of Time,” by Jagger and Richards. It’s Mick Jagger’s birthday. He’s 74. Wonder what he’s doing. How does a Mick Jagger celebrate 74 trips around the sun?

Brian Jones played the marimbas.

Brian Jones. It’s never too odd or old or out of time to think of Brian Jones. He always seemed to be goofily smiling. Puffy-eyed. He is the most undead dead person I know.

And then there is Peter Green’s “Albatross.” That lovely, incomparable, rhythmic pulsing bass, like the slow graceful moves of the bird’s flight over Antarctic waters, dreamy, crepuscular. A nice way to ease into the night. Into void. Shōbōgenzō. The wonderful heart-mind of Nirvana.

The empire of night is all that it seems, tassels, sperm, desperation, the blue fish of dream. And then some. It all squiggles, wriggles, walks its weight around the sun, enigmas of Norwegian rock, oceans, the huff and splash of waves roiling in, roiling out.

Memory of E.G. Marshal’s voice introducing CBS Mystery Theatre and its creaking door one night between Redding and San Francisco on I-5, a big full moon to my left, clouds scudding by like bridal veils. Summer, 1976. The year that the Apple Computer Company started. That future did not have me in it.

What if Kerouac, passing through Denver in 1942 had met my mother, got married, had me, would I still be me, I would not be me, I would be John Kerouac, Junior, or some such ridiculous thing.

I go to bed and listen to a podcast on a French internet radio station called Dans l’atelier de l’artiste hosted by Adèle Van Reeth, who regularly hosts a program called Les Chemins de la philosophie (The Roads of Philosophy). The show is about Jan Vermeer. The guest is art historian Jan Blanc, author of Vermeer: la fabrique de la gloire. He talks about the light in Vermeer, how omnipresent it is, how modulated into different tones, intensities. How the light is a sharp, living, dynamic clarity that chisels shadows, assigns them a place, and presents objects and people with an uncanny lucidity that borders on the phantasmal. How the light streaming in from the outside seems to put the chaos in domestic settings in place, in flowing, serene arrangement. He talks about Vermeer’s “The Astronomer,” that the man sitting in the chair with one hand on the globe and the other resting on an ornate fabric is actually Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the Father of Microbiology, and that the room is bathed in an aqueous light, an illumination of glowing, empirical awareness. Everything in the room appears steeped in experiential speculation: the window, the chair, the cabinet with a pile of books on top.

Blanc further remarks that Vermeer, like Proust, used articles from daily life to create a new reality, a sense that the visible world held unseen charms, that the phantasmal appearance of our daily realities was similar to the cave in Plato’s allegory, that it’s all illusion, a false reality. How the world itself is a fabrication, a product of our perceptions, how we compartmentalize and organize our sensations, channel our perceptions to make sense of the chaotic sensorium in which we make our way.

One might also interpret this tendency otherwise, that it depicts a reality we only rarely come into rapport with, that our awareness is often blunted by stress and routine. Artists like Vermeer bring it into focus. Blanc also talks about Vermeer’s alleged use of a camera obscura technique, basically a box with a hole in it. Light from the scene passes through the hole where it is reproduced with its color and perspective onto an internal surface. If the image is projected by way of an angled mirror onto paper, it can then be traced by the artist.

It remains a controversy as to whether Vermeer used this device. There are also little pinholes in his canvases where he may have used string for accurately gauging angles for vanishing point perspective and illusions of depth.

Ain’t reality a gas? There are so many ways to play with it, coast by its shores, look for it, pan for it, filter it, juggle it, walk through it.

Still can’t sleep, so I try listening to a talk by Eckhart Tolle on meditation. This guy always puts me to sleep. He has such a soothing voice and is such a calm presence, though I wish he’d shave his chin more often, that hair on his chin is weird. It’s not a beard, it doesn’t even look like it wants to be a beard, it’s just whiskers he didn’t get to, didn’t bargain with, so it’s just there, casually. Tolle dings his flat little bells, I love that sound, love the way it starts out brightly then dissipates into nothing, he does this three times, then begins talking, and is almost immediately interrupted by an ad, a Swiss girl selling cheese. So I look for something else. I turn off the Bluetooth and settle on a classical music station, KING FM.

After R arrived home we went for a short three-mile run. I wanted to stop again at the Five Corner hardware store to get a mini LED flashlight. I these things. It occurred to me that something might be stuck in the blades of the garbage disposal unit. Maybe that was why it was jammed. I bought a red one. We also stopped at the library to drop off the Nick Cave film documentary One More Time With Feeling, a very strange chronicle with a tragic event at its core, but unless you know what it is before the movie begins, you think you know what it might be, there are evident clues, but you don’t know for sure. It’s never stated. We looked it up later and discovered that Nick Cave's 15-year old son Arthur had fallen from a cliff near their home in Brighton and died. Nick Cave has had four sons, Arthur, Luke, Jethro and Earl. Arthur and Earl were twins. Earl makes a studio visit during the movie which, not yet knowing what had happened, made us wonder if the tragic event had occurred during the filming of the movie. It had, but it hadn't been Earl, it had been his twin brother Arthur. Recording sessions for what would be the album Skeleton Tree continued two weeks after the tragedy. The pain was palpable. Cave describes the event as a black hole that swallows one's universe. "It's the invisible things that have so much mass," he observes. And yet the music continued. And was quite beautiful. 

The library was closed. We could’ve dropped the movie into the collection bin, which is a little steel door that pulls out from the brick wall in the enclosed entrance, but the movie hadn’t been officially checked out to Roberta and she needed to tell a librarian that she left with a movie that hadn’t been properly processed at the self-serve computer.

I shot a bright beam of LED light into the garbage disposal unit. The blades were thick and shallow. I thought they’d be much bigger. It looked very silty, but I didn’t see any object whatever. The movable parts, gears and whatnot, must’ve rusted together. Fused like the creature in the 1979 movie Alien, still sitting at the controls, fossilized and black.

Tom Skerrit used to come into the pastry shop where R once worked. He liked Mozart.

Some interesting terms on the French news this morning: juillettistes and aoûtiens. They sound like religious or political organizations. A juillettiste is someone who vacations in July, and an aoûtien is someone who vacations in August.

Also, the phrase “circulation en accordeon,” which means stop and go traffic.

There is a lot of coverage on the French news about the forest fires that devastated parts of Corsica and the south of France, mainly in the Vars, and the Bormes-les-Mimosa. Over 10,000 people were evacuated, sent to cots in high school gymnasiums, old people and young, all with  grim looks of anguish, worries about their homes, pets, wallets, documents, family photos. Heavy winds made the flames unpredictable. The fires had an internal rhythm all their own. Terrible. It looked like the entire world was burning down.

Big sun, blue sky, warm air this afternoon (70 degrees Fahrenheit), sound of a shovel scraping on asphalt, then silence as dirt is flung, crying baby, barking dog, thump, thump, thump of my running shoes on gravel, smell of must emanating from a garage sale across the street on West McGraw Place, cluster of signs stuck in the median grass at 3^rd Avenue West, 21 candidates for mayor, murder occurred here a few weeks back, husband shot his wife in the back of the head during a heated argument in an Uber car, woke up later in some bushes not knowing what had happened, I know Uber had nothing to do with it (the driver feared for his life and survived by keeping his cool and being cooperative until he let the man out of the car and then alerted the police) but I really hate Uber, I see it as an excrescence of neoliberal crassness, an exploitative practice that undermines all the good that comes from collective bargaining, maybe I should run for mayor, kick Uber and the cruise ships out of Seattle, and thus the mind churns, spins, chews, expatiates, I focus on the uphill task ahead of me, not much of a hill really but still a hill, I rise into a little business district, Ken’s Market, Queen Anne Health Food, Joseph Hair Salon, Tulinda Yoga, StateFarm Insurance, Macrina Bakery, kid’s red wagon parked in front of Costello’s Custom Upholstery, family eating in front of Maleno’s Taco Shop, huge white lilies arranged in a wall-mounted phone booth, the phone totally gone, in its place are Christian icons, Saints and Angels, I nearly collide with a young fat woman walking along gazing at her smartphone by the Fountainhead Art Gallery, a tall athletic man in his 40s goes running by to my left, further up 10^th Avenue West a young woman with glasses looks up from her smartphone resting on the rampart, smiles, and says hello. I say hello back and keep on going, arriving home to shower and greet R and rub Athena’s white furry belly and eat tortellini and do some laundry and much later hear a helicopter beat the air with its blades no doubt eyeing the big Seafair parade travel downtown Seattle for one of the local news stations as I try to read Proust. 

Frog

Let me show you a frog. It will not be a real frog, but a frog in the form of a word, which is a frog nevertheless, a frog of the mind, which is a Platonic frog, a chimerical frog, a frog whose reality is lingual, syllables and swamps, reeds and reading and cattails and sedge. An imaginary frog. The image of a frog, yes, certainly, an image, a picture, but if you’re a generous person, excitable, munificent, a little eccentric, genially inclined to get into it, prepared and ready to fully imagine a frog, plop the entire creature with its webbed limbs and beating heart and amazing tongue and sticky saliva into the pond of your mind, we’re on to something, we’re interrelating, we’re bringing a creature into being, you and I and language, this web of words, this integument connecting us, allowing our imaginations the capacity to carry a frog from the hypothetical to the squishy and immediate, the sliminess of its skin, the softness of its belly, the prominence of its eyes, the squirm of its legs, the membranes between the toes, if you can do that, I thank you, the frog thanks you, you will be an invaluable member of this enterprise, this endeavor, this amphibious journey, you will help to fulfill the forgery of this frog, the fraud of this frog, which is also a veracity of frog, true in every detail, provided by you, your mind, with a swamp in it.

When was the last time you saw a frog? Me, I haven’t seen one in years. I did see a dragonfly recently. I thought it was a butterfly at first. But it flew with such evident intent, such vigor and mercurial speed, I knew it couldn’t be a butterfly, that kind of flutter from which reveries are made, but a shiny primordial thing, something out of the cretaceous, huge cypresses and longnecked sauropods grinding algae and plants with enormous peg-like teeth, would you call that reverie, I guess you could call that reverie.

Reverie is Cretaceous.

Thinking is Cenozoic.

But really. What do I know about thinking? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. That’s a total admission. A confession. I’m filling in spaces. I’m creating intervals. Octaves. Rhythms. Melodies. Distortions. Gropings. Grapplings. I’m swimming. I’m sweating. I’m addled. I’m rattled. Totally unraveled. At some point in one’s writing fingers scampering all over the keyboard you turn into Chopin.

Or think you do.

And that is called thinking. Mental activity. Brain waves. Images.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, said Hamlet.

And what of our frog? The frog, being amphibious, is intrinsically ambiguous.

And endangered.

In Ecuador, rare frogs are being saved from poachers on the black market by a scientific company called Wikiri by raising them in terrariums. They are then put into an ethical “bio-trade.”

Wikiri manager Lola Guarderas holds a glass frog whose translucent skin reveals its organs and beating heart.

I imagine holding a word, the word ‘frog,’ whose translucent letters reveal its inner organs of etymology and meaning.

The word ‘frog’ in Spanish is ‘rana.’ As in: La rana saltó al estanque: kerplop.

The frog  jumped into the pond: kerplop.

Kerplop is universal.

Onomatopaeia is universal. It’s also hard to spell.

If you hold the Word ‘onomatopaeia’ in your hand you can see its internal organs and heart beating: lub-a-dub, lub-a-dub, lub-a-dub.

What is this obsession between language and things? Is it because language is a membrane? A living organism created by tongues and vibrations and air?

In a word: yes.

As Water Is In Water

This sauce needs a snowball. I want to sugar the smell of your memory at this stage. To live in this mud is to deny to deepen to believe. Autumn is a heavy liquid that slips into winter. So knotty closer to you that your perfume opens my elevator.

Body embassy to the contrary I’m a reflection of surgical device. I have a franchise on candle wire. Embolden causes bone. Palpate flash of mimosa buttermilk. Troika fire. The quantum key breaking in my shoulder pin causes nothing but magnets.

The writing of the mollusk stings the gravity of convergence. The letter of the air acquires a puddle. I hang in the belief of doing water by swarming an apricot with the blue emissions of my inner pronoun, which shakes in its hooks. The mêlée that is nature has a thematic storm to railroad as the bandits vanish into the hills. The velour of sleep finishes its fingers in the sink.

I have shreds of Rocky Mountain moss and subtle pants. I have a drink to look for lazy sequels to busy days and slip toward catastrophes of grammar. I glean honest calories from stealing my shoes with walking. I write an aromatic sound to hit the flu into orbit. I see angels of rain swing down and flood the tamarind and dry river beds of Texas.

I’ve embarrassed myself before and I’ll do it again. Pile up the forget book. I do ink in a foggy condition of philosophic sap. I have a stem of fabric for the verbal regattas splashing around in my tired brain. Nerves are an accidentally heated species of scrambled cat bath.

I drink a broom of emotion and am swept away. The noun is a hummingbird of nature’s leg and is a steady precursor to the expansion of thought. Sawdust marks the place where the marble phenomenon of art hammers at the capharnaüm of life and awakens the sleep of scrap metal. The full articulation of a knuckle points to the flying ray of the windshield.

Catch a sturgeon from a muslin bee ray. It is to finish drinking to build a pleasure. It is to calculate a swampy dying sadness with harmonica twine. A tongue reflected on the virgin ceiling. Percussion of a sneaker’s person moment.

Yesterday’s scarlet is today’s sorbet feeling. Small lashing of a lush clawing that drums the eyes into seeing. Head to the street where the damask whistles meringue. Picnic on Desire Mountain. Embolden the magnolia that it spreads its limbs to the stars and catches the universe in the lap of its theology.

There is nothing sadder than a naked heart. Cotton field in Mississippi heat. The blood of the thrush spelling its pleasures on a blue towel. A sorcerer gnaws a reverie while a man in a tinfoil mask dances with a blowtorch. The cottonmouth is slow but unpredictable.

This sleeve is a natural expansion of what there is to do about a spatula. There is a conception of height that weighs less than a pound and a coin of water immodest as wheels. It makes the lavender move closer. We need the perfume of it to pivot in blurry coalition and pay for the linen. There is a shadow in my hand wiggly as rhubarb and cagey as a sullen homunculus that demands expression in the totem of my caterwaul.

And so it shall be. That one day a depth will rise to the surface and cease to be a depth and be more like a season, an indigenous part of a spectral muskellunge, and leap into the air, and fill the eyes with spectacle. This is called looking, which is a form of seeing, which is a form of perception, which is a form of straining, an effort to be in the world, and take notice of things, and write them down, where they may become guitars or wool. For example, the little Blue Heron is white for its first year until it goes into its breeding season, when the plumage becomes a splotchy blue, and the man in the boat is alone and watchful, and mesmerized by the waves, their rhythm and form, which is an energy moving through the water, as energy moves through the brain, and becomes thought.

And the heron takes flight. The sky is a girl wandering the dead body of the moon. The garden introduces us to the poem of the stars. How much am I assuming here? I have a forehead and a pound of knowledge to trade for a fast car and a getaway plan, which is all I know at the moment, as things fall into place and the car starts, and the engine heats and the words take off for France, which is how I feel, and is both absurd and meaningless, but not so absurd it can’t be verified or put in a bag and carried across the border.

Too Much In The Sun

I was eager to see the shadows lengthen during the performance of Richard II. It was a hot afternoon in mid-July. We were seated outside on a bath towel at Volunteer Park in Seattle. It had been slightly overcast when we arrived, and there was still an intermittent chill in the air. But shortly after having spread the towel on the grass and sitting down and removing our shoes and stretching our legs out the clouds had mostly disappeared and the sun shone in full glory.

The only shade available was to the far left of the amphitheater and was already fully occupied by a group of people. I’m guessing these people were familiar with the grounds and knew that this would be the only shade within shouting distance of the action about to unfold.  But then, when we first arrived, shade had not been on my mind. I wondered, in fact, if I might need to wear my jacket during the performance. I was quickly disabused of that notion. I felt the full temper of the sun on my face and hands. I was wearing jeans. My legs broiled like chickens in a rotisserie.

Here’s the thing: I crave heat all year long. So when it gets here, when I’m feeling it, I immerse myself in it even to the point of total, excruciating discomfort. That’s so when fall arrives and Seattle recedes once again into the gloom of cold wet days inevitably adrift into the sodden vulva of winter I will retain some memory of the sun’s luscious heat in my bones.

I made a mental note to bring a large umbrella next time we attend a free Shakespeare in the park performance and then surrendered myself to the nuclear fusion furnace that is the sun. How is it possible, I wondered, for that big gold thing to go on exploding and exploding without, you know, exploding? Exploding like other things explode on earth, volcanos and bridges and bank vaults, in a hail of rocks and smoke and debris and total destruction. Like the twin towers on 9/11 when they went pop! pop! pop! pop! and collapsed in a fine powder of exquisitely organized controlled demolition.

But not the sun. It explodes a billion trillion times in a gazillion different places and remains, a great sphere of steady never-failing light spewing flame and solar wind into the cold deep hollows of space. How does that happen? I know, turbulent whorls of atomic nuclei exchanging properties and the consequent differences in mass produce energy.

Or something to that effect.

And it goes on and on and on. For at least another five billion years. But I still look up, squint, take a quick look, and worry about what would happen if it just blinked and went out. You know? Just hung there, a giant lump of coal. Which we probably wouldn’t be able to see, the darkness would be so impenetrable. How long would it take before we all froze? Fun things to think about before a play about the fall of a king begins.

The Society of American Fight Directors put on a show of sword fights. A large man and an attractive woman in striped pants fought one another with swords, jabbing, twirling, clanking. It was graceful and fluid. One of the parties played dead and the crowd applauded. The sword people bowed and left the grounds. A woman with flaming red hair began pounding a drum. Richard II and his retinue appeared and the play began.

Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster,

Hast thou according to thy oath and band

Brought hither Henry Hereford, they bold son,

Here to make good the boist’rous late appeal,

Which then our leisure would not let us hear,

Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?

The actors were all dressed in heavy Elizabethan costumes, which I pitied. The heat in all that fabric must’ve been considerable.

Richard II bore a remarkable resemblance to the young Mel Gibson of The Road Warrior. The actor’s name was Gavin Douglas and he had recently moved to Seattle from southern Oregon.

The word ‘sun’ appears eight times in Richard II. I find its first mention deeply moving. It comes after Richard has banished Henry Bolingbroke from England. “Your will be done: this must my comfort be, / That sun that warms you here shall shine on me, / And those his golden beams to you here lent / Shall point on me, and gild my banishment.”

The scope of this statement is stunning. The idea that wherever in the world he goes the same sun shining on England will be shining on him is nothing less than cosmic. The word ‘cosmic’ does not appear anywhere in Shakespeare’s works, but that’s the word for it.

‘Cosmic’ comes from Greek ‘kosmikos,’ meaning “of the universe.”  The statement reveals a great deal about Henry Bolingbroke’s character. It foreshadows his way to the throne in the regal breadth of its fullness and latitude, and implies (perhaps unknowingly) the relativity of wealth and power. England isn’t the only game in town.

As the play proceeded, I grew hotter, and began looking longingly at the wall of the amphitheater: a small thin strand of shadow appeared at its base. I looked at the sun. It was still high in the sky. It was doubtful that it would lower enough in the next half hour to lengthen that small thin band into a broad swath of cooling air.

In Act III, scene iii, Richard languishes in Flint Castle, in Wales, powerless, without an army. Bolingbroke still respects the guy: “See, see” he says, genuinely excited, “King Richard himself doth appear, / As doth the blushing discontented sun / From out the fiery portal of the east, / When he perceives the envious clouds are bent / To dim his glory and to stain the track / Of his bright passage to the occident.”

‘Occident’ comes in a bit awkwardly at the end, a rather clunky word, clunkier than ‘west,’ but ‘occident’ rhymes with ‘bent’ and ‘west’ does not.

It’s now late in the play I’m getting dizzy and a little nauseous from the direct sunlight pounding its way into my head. I hope I don’t get sunburned on the top of my head. I check periodically to reassure myself that I have enough hair to prevent sunburn. I don’t feel reassured. It feels pretty thin up there.

The play ends and we get up from our bath towel. It feels good to get some movement into my body. I hand Henry Bolingbroke a ten-dollar bill. He thanks me, smiles, and leaves to accept donations from others getting their things together.

The performance in the park, staged by Green Stage, was streamlined to fit within a two-hour timeframe. Yet strangely, one of the speeches included in their production was excluded from the 2012 British television film version of Richard II, with Ben Whishaw playing Richard II and Rory Kinnear as Bolingbroke. This is Scene ii from Act II and depicts the Queen interacting with Richard’s friends Bushy and Bagot. The scene is expendable in terms of the plot; Richard and his queen don’t interact until deep into the play. There is nothing to suggest what their relationship is like. Most recent productions suggest Richard is gay. He appears to be hanging out with his male friends most of the time. The Queen is an afterthought. But this is unintentional. She really does love Richard, and her anxiety about his future is very movingly displayed. Bushy’s attempt at making her feel less apprehensive is an astonishingly insightful speech. “Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,” he tells her, “Which shows like grief itself, but is not so; For Sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects, / Like perspectives which, rightly gazed upon, / Show nothing but confusion.”

“It may be so,” the Queen answers, “but yet my inward soul / Persuades me it is otherwise… As, though on thinking on no thought I think, / Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.”

“Heavy nothing.” That’s brilliant. She knows her anxiety is illusory, a product of the mind run amok, perspectives awry, everything distorted, exaggerated, blown out of proportion. It’s strange to find this in a text 422 years old. But why should that be? Why shouldn’t an educated person living in Elizabethan England wonder about the nature of anxiety? And come to a conclusion as brilliant as Richard’s distraught Queen: “For nothing hath begot my something grief, / Or something hath the nothing that I grieve: / Tis in reversion that I do possess, / But what it is that is not yet known what, / I cannot name; ‘tis nameless woe I wot.”

We have a term for it in the 21^st century: GAD. Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

Which sounds clinical and smacks of health policy issues. I prefer “heavy nothing.” But try to get a prescription for that.

Lassitude Of Twisting Quintessence

Camel camaraderie away like bones in densely mixed tongues. Plop cat of chaos paint. Street on the roof of my shoulder where the pavement is speed. Body pins falling from an edge of morning. The weary emissary crosses the field. A church bell rings. Religious practices are charming if they don’t pinch too much or provoke guerrilla warfare. Bob Kaufman crouches in my heart, a forgotten corner I didn’t know I had until he stumbled into it, a brilliant maniac waiting to be loved.

I get a bang out of cashmere. Perception is easy. It’s also bugs.

Grimace talk chair. Swarm and swirl and swirl and swarm and hold my eyes in this sentence long enough to read what is coming next which is blinding in its brightness. I am coming toward you in ashes. The beauty of ash is primordial. Support the rod of wandering. Thursday’s salt, Friday’s sheen. Heaven in a warehouse.

A snap plumps my heft into operation. I constrained an imponderable crack to say obstetrics to you and mean it. And I do I mean to stroll to the end and make another beginning out of moss. Innocence adapts to figures of speech. Metaphors set up camp in Romania.

I hear an identity chattering under my skin. It's exciting to see our minds come together in a sentence. Is this that sentence? Are we greenhorns in paradise?

I stand here in your café riveted to your definitions of sluice. The snow is an embodiment of heaven and I can understand its presence in the spoons, but the fugue that just went by was big as a truck and hinted at molybdenum as a possible resource in the future of our confusion.

Pile up the food of thought on pallets of mimosa butter. The stone makes the toad go up the mountain in a chivalry of popping thunder. Queen Mab in her greenery swarms the climbing she does with touch and artery. Flashing pins of complicated speed cause the manuscript in the attic to get Mustang and dive through the air on San Francisco hills. Later, after breakfast, the words convene in glass and I feel the obstinacy of the window when I photograph the turbulence of the aurora borealis as it existed three million years ago in an agate.

I’m writing an enigmatic mimosa, a mundane welcome ticket for the velvet hippopotamus of my congenial rage. I’m foggy, traveling in a misty state. Nothing is clear except wax. The wind climbs my capharnaüm. The introspection rivals the transcendence of a hinge.

The door opens and here we are.

I need the elf because the ice cracks. The caboose has a frog for rent, and a calm green moment that bubbles out of a floorboard. I’m visiting the barge right now and forcing myself to pray for the penumbral irritations I’ve managed to gather over a lifetime of irritations. The penumbral irritations are special because they exist in a timeless margin of funny brochures.

The locals say the skin of the Colorado River Toad makes a good hallucinogen, but my irritations assume a life of their own and continue as words, pulling images and thoughts behind them, forging new associations, new immensities of penumbral art, new irritations, new speculations, new fitting rooms for the mall, which is deserted, thanks to Amazon, and a dreadful economy. Hence, words, which have an exchange value of their own, I don’t know what, bitcoins, recommendations, comments on Facebook, seesaws, patents, descriptions of pain, the strange behaviors of cats.

They say the lake is garish and extroverted, but I found it hanging from a branch of the words, braided and abstract.

Lassitude of twisting quintessence. Sunset cloud sleeping in the orchard. The breath of the poem is a perusal of Eden floating in a fog of absence. Frankly, the handkerchief is not the panacea I thought it was but just another busy conception of dirt. The sky offers its sloth in a crate on the shore. We can use it to build our conversation.

Or not.

Hey, here’s a boat. This makes my grammar pink. It does it to cinnamon and then crumbles into upheaval. Garments are often green but the pretzels weren’t and that makes everything harked or something. Crinkled like a scrotum.

Packed with straw.

Children behave. That’s what they say when we’re together. Watch how you play.

I don’t remember much after that. There was a knife on the bottom. I didn’t know quite what to do, so I just flared into talk and added myriad subtleties of tone to my voice to confuse the crowd into thinking it was a form of invocation. You can tell them back home it didn’t quite work. I’m out on bail now. It’s spring, and that rusty old hook is still in me. I can’t quite cut loose. Not just yet. There are still some things I need to do.

I want to magnify the magnetic air until the words in my mouth catch fire. You know? I’m not superstitious but there’s going to come a time when I’ve got to spit them all out like chrome buckles on Attic Street. William Hurt hurries with a hurt back to a Paris taxi. They stop a few blocks later to pick up Geena Davis. This is a typical afternoon for me, my dazzling teeth gliding through an almanac of hope and despair while my shoulders brace for the next burden. This is the membrane of my sparkling world. See the needle nail in the wax man? It’s the B side of the aforementioned membrane. The water shouts meaning at a revelation purged of cows and the scribbles in the sand murmur of impersonal pressures. The mind likes these things. Creosote and ice cream, the ocean rolling in and out.