Heading Out

So here’s me in a Viking ship drifting out into space it’s a fantasy of course the way I envision a good death look at all the drama I put into it ridiculous of course no death has that kind of glamour it’s all ego and cheesy sci fi posters the kind those heavy metal bands once favored for their vinyl record sleeves

Space isn’t a thing per se it’s an expression of interrelations among events when my words touch the air a skating rink explodes with Tonya Harding I like the way red powers its way into green and Tonya lands a triple axel imagine that you awaken one day to find yourself floating in a sealed elevator a fathom is a ceremony of depth thin-boned as a bird all masses all velocities all forces are relative

I’m hungry as a mailbox in Pittsburgh a divine presence has eaten our greed all we have left is one another the taste of a pineapple is sharp and generous adrift in deep space as the more furious energies in the wider universe of galaxies make me think of the faucets of finance as absurdly illusory I’m building space and time like Bill Frisell playing on his Yanuziello guitar a stack of papers black with equations at my elbow morning comes and delineates the crest of the mountains the entire world is but a grand illusion spun in the loom of force fields objects approaching the speed of light increase in mass I feel the temperature at the core of the sun in my vituperative misrule

The interferometer floats in a pool of mercury an enormous ooze seething with declension the clutch of the real holds a two-dimensional wafer of infinite mass I feel like a lost explorer discarding my things on the desert sand to lighten my load I don’t like making oaths my descriptions harden into bone and I keep walking keep following that photogenic grammar of string as matter curves space and I see a man’s head rotating in its mercury pool weaving a web of words across the sky

Ink and butter are lions of moral progress an aroused mind present in glimpses disperses periods of concentration with balance and precision and delights in moving worlds hurtling past one another at staggering speeds through the undulations of space

An old man on his way to acupuncture a ghost ship alive with Saint Elmo’s fire everything clinging everything reaching the whole shebang the modem the piccolo the misdemeanor all make me realize my job is in the nature of being not doing the new soap dispenser arrived yesterday it’s got a sensor you put a dish or your hand under there and soap squirts out

Like words I don’t like it when the same thought circulates in my head we refine our search for gold by walking sideways like crabs and tie molecules together to form objects

Everything on our planet has been created by a fat massive sun which hangs in the sky like an orange squashed between a titan’s hands what if the most exciting thing in life is to die an object increases when it absorbs energy picture a subversive gazing at the silken surface of the sea

Poetry amplifies the air a whirling magnet will generate an electrical current in a surrounding web of wire I knit a black noise bouncing radar waves off Mercury

Out yonder is this huge world which exists independently of us human beings and stands before us like a huge riddle I know my rights I know what I can say and what I cannot say this is true not just for a spaceship gliding toward the stars I have roots in Peru we look up to see a hawk every dynamo houses a whirling mystery I wear my hunger like I wear my sleeve rolled up and lenient nature lives in motion endless covers of “One More Cup Of Coffee” delivered with the energy of a steam engine mass and energy are interchangeable my transformation sparkles underwater

I rise and become a temperature squirting sperm everywhere I put my anguish up for sale my attention is absorbed by a raisin the invisible field that conveys magnetic force I’m a citizen of the universe it’s just that demon life has got me in its sway I fall into morning as morning falls into afternoon the flowers of sedition talk to one another sunlight penetrates the Black Forest I want to paint a flame like Georges de la Tour and push it toward the red end of the spectrum 

The Age Of Raisin

I have a craving for raisins. I have no reason to crave a raisin and yet I crave a raisin. The craving of a raisin craves a reason for having a raisin. I raise the craving to the sprawl of possibility. The possibility is everywhere possible except when it’s impossible and then the impossible becomes possible and this possibility is the impossible undoing of impossibility. Impossibility is possible because possibility becomes an impossibility when impossibility becomes possible. The reasoning is circular, like a raisin. A dark wrinkled raisin. Each little raisin looks like the scrotum of a tiny elf. But a mound of raisins, a bunch of raisins, an agglomeration of raisins, is a meditation of matter, an imbroglio of the particular.  

The need for sunlight is the reason why grapes are grown in the San Joaquin Valley. Sunlight pounds the valley like a hammer of radiant force. The grapes dry and their skin wrinkles into dark little kisses of light.

Reason pounds the irrational brain into tiny wrinkled raisins of scrotal scripture.

I love raisins. I like to scoop them up with a spoon and put them in my mouth. I put all my metaphors aside and appreciate them for what they are until they’re swallowed and the metaphors come rushing back into my head and I have to do something about them.

The metaphors, that is. Not the raisins. The raisins have their own raisin d’être.

I have a reason to love raisins and the reason is reasonable and topaz. I don’t know why it’s topaz. I just like the word topaz. My reason for topaz is exonerating and vinyl. You can see where this is going.

A pair of pears glares among the dappled apples. Shinto potatoes tiptoe amid a dumb show of grapes agape in the landscape. Helen’s melons gel in Helena. The swans in Ceylon feed on the lawn in the bygone chiffon of dawn. Hemmed in lemons persimmons summon the calmness of a psalmist in the juice of abuse. And the squash is awash with the slosh of the posh in the moonlight of our midnight appetite.

Clearly, the world is a place of things. Tables, chairs, pulleys, guitars, trees, rocks, hats, plugs, rugs, drugs and bugs. Heliotrope and fruit. Grapes and apes and drapes and crêpes. Figs and twigs and Buddha’s hand.

I’m not separate from the world. Nobody is. When the world dies we die. Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you said Whitman, who had a lot of atoms.

Heidegger referred to the mind as a “cabinet of consciousness” as a false premise. There’s no separation between the mind and the world.

Think about that. Pop a raisin in your mouth and chew it into the universe that is you. And ask yourself: is what is in me and about me and around me one and the same? Yes and no. The body is host to the soul which is nowhere without the body and everywhere when the body goes.  

What surrounds me, what surrounds you, is Umwelt.

That’s what I’m putting out there today, right now. These are ideas. Just ideas. Perceptions hammered into words and vertices. Refreshments on the counter. Spring rain at the window. The blades of a fan. The sheen on the coffee table. The pain in my shoulder. The warmth in my hand. The pleasing reasoning in the taste of a raisin. 

Mighty River

Mighty river climbing into pique. Miscreant fiend sulking in jolts of fauna. Punctilious chocolate pleats. Checkerboard porthole crumbs. I’m the extension I wanted the ticks are naughty but the embarrassment is wadded in protons. This makes the nexus vanilla. I’m massive today in my pratfalls. Independent and soluble. I can lariat a grievance and bring it down into dust and cinch distaste into puppets. Gardenias of ruminant formaldehyde darn the unicorns with fingers like wigwams. The fabric I used to patrol the inseam is now a private rapture. The fez of the rival river has rivets of radiant champagne. There can be no metal without a brain that jets around in carnivals. Let this be the patriarch whose biases inflate with authority every time the misanthropes convene in division of themselves. Dextrose parquet or polar stumble, either way, the commas are restored to their natural ideals of blackberry and sage. A viscous discussion of Plato leads to horses, the pounding of hooves and the barking of dogs. The geology leaps onto my lap and breathes heavily like a cardboard upholsterer. Everybody knows the guide is a parakeet. But the fireplace pivots on a dormouse oinking in the rusted failure of our trilogy. Insinuation is often like that. It bubbles in its harness like a hairy asteroid and then is poured over pasta which makes the climate very close to being classified as a contest winner. 

Breakfast

This morning I removed the screw holding the handle to the sauce pan I use for making scrambled eggs. The handle has a tendency to come loose. You don’t want a handle coming off in your hand when you’re cooking something. For a long time now it’s been my favorite pan for cooking scrambled eggs. I think that’s all I’ve ever cooked in it. I thought if I bought a new Philip’s head machine screw to replace it I could do a better job tightening it. But once I got the screw out and wiped it off with a paper towel it looked fine. The problem wasn’t with the screw. Something else had worn away. We’d simply have to get a new pan. That was the prudent course of action anyway since the Teflon was beginning to flake and come off. You don’t want Teflon in your stomach. I have enough problems with too much butter and keeping my cholesterol down. I don’t need a bunch of polymerized tetrafluoroethylene added to the mix of toxins already scrambled in my belly.

Breakfast is otherwise fulfilled. A piece of toast slathered with peanut butter and strawberry jam, scrambled eggs and a glass of grape juice to wash it down. I love food. I’ve grown to appreciate food more as I’ve grown older. I remember in my 20s breakfast consisted of a cigarette and a cup of coffee. I didn’t begin eating an actual breakfast of food until my early 40s, after I’d quit drinking and smoking. That was the general pattern – a sip of coffee followed by an introsepective inhalation and exhalation of smoke - but there were mornings in my 30s when I was grievously hungover yet weirdly hungry when a helping of bacon and pancakes and fried eggs sunny side up was heaven on a plate. So I’ve had a good couple of decades now of enjoying food, including breakfast. I’ve gone through a number of phases and appetites: scrambled eggs and toast, bananas and toast, bagels and toast, oatmeal and toast, doughnuts and grape juice, cinnamon rolls and coffee, always coffee, coffee has been a staple since late adolescence.

I worry about Nebraska. The flooding there this spring has been catastrophic. Roads, bridges, buildings, homes, farms and levees have been destroyed. It’s the worst flooding in anyone’s memory. The most terrible thing in my mind is the loss of livestock, pigs, chickens, cattle and calves being carried away in cold, muddy, turbulent water. The extreme cold of the winter, blizzards, subzero temperatures, strong, relentless, biting winds was bad enough. But the flooding was its own form of holocaust. I can see the panic in their eyes. I can’t imagine the horror of that.

And the early harvests were destroyed. Food prices will be astronomical this spring and summer. And then will come the wildfire smoke from the north in Canada and east in the Cascades. The planet is quickly becoming uninhabitable.

It all makes writing or painting or building look ridiculous. There’s simply no reason for it. Though I’m not sure there ever was. There are lot of things you do in life that don’t make any sense, but you do them anyway, as if you’re being carried off by an invisible, supernatural current of some sort. It’s an energy. A very goofy energy. It drives you. You could call it libidinal, there’s elements of that, it’s always generally there in one form or another getting people into trouble, but it doesn’t have an erotic vibe. It is something moving through you even in moods of despair and gloom, it expands you, dilates you, makes you feel a little lighter, a little less dead, a little more worried about dying, but not overconcerned about dying either.

I go for an annual physical. I’m early. I fill it out a short form asking questions about the state of my health (hell, I could’ve filled this thing out and mailed it in and skipped the damn physical) and sit and read Le parti pris des choses by Francis Ponge, which I stuck in my jacket before I left. I wonder if Ponge ever wrote about pans? He must have a prose poem somewhere about pans. They’re a natural. Such beautiful objects. I start fantasizing about sauce pans and butter and scrambled eggs. That first pat of butter that begins to melt and diffuse over the surface of the pan and then the eggs plopped in, the shells cracked expertly and evenly, the two halves tossed into the compost.

I read “Conception of Love in 1928,” “I doubt that true love involves desire, fervor, passion. I don’t doubt that it can: born of a disposition to approve anything, then from a friendly abandonment to chance, or to the usages of the world…,” as a young man and woman walk by. The man is pushing a pram with a newborn and the woman is walking awkwardly, her legs spaced apart as she hobbles along.  Funny how Ponge’s quiet and rather opaque reflection on love is echoed by this ongoing reproductive drama of our species, even as the climate warms and the animals die off.

The physical goes fine and I get dressed and go back into early April sunlight and drive home. I fasted for my blood draw and have for the last few days been avoiding all my favorite foods like eggs and butter so my cholesterol levels aren’t too shocking. I hate statins. All I’ve had so far today is coffee. I’m starving. I can’t wait to get some food into my body.

No new pan yet. I get the old pan out, slice a pat of butter and drop it in and watch it diffuse into transparency. Eggs always feel wonderful in the hand. What a wonderful shape. What incredible smoothness. They crack so easily. The insides glisten, goopily, into the pan, the yolks still whole, shiny, bright yellow, like something out of fairyland. I get a wooden salad fork and when the heat of the electric burner begins to make the fluidity congeal I being stirring it up into a chaos of lumpy yellow. I add two pieces of toast slathered with peanut butter and jam and pour a glass of grape juice. Breakfast.

A Species Of Sun

Lightning laziness thinks swaying is reaching for age. Gym chapped greenery that mockingbirds venerate. Mahogany paragraph thunder. Quintessentially elected quilting. Granulated fizzy capstan.

The round weight of the handkerchief adheres to a sense of conceit. So blow your nose. A single pearl will translate the tale. Cravings whistle the light up. A sweet sinking old motion makes the shuffle dance a sensation we can bring to the sandstone and turn to camaraderie. There’s a swirl in my shoulder that confirms the dancing once again in the heat of my emerald. You can always tell yourself to lift your life into the stars. The yearbooks will appear later wearing words like a person.

It wasn’t long before other thoughts moved us forward onto wheels. Everything rolls. Everything bowls. Everything strolls. Bowls and goals and holes and foals and poles and souls.

Loons on a spree in a convent van.

The nebulous mushroom visit made us all happy. The habitat climbed into us to be healed. I’m not sure it worked. The trees looked injured. But the moon was alright. The almanac phenomenon weighed as much as a bell pepper. This amused the extrusion, but the intrusions were sadly trapezoidal, and sank into the ground while the armchair snickered among its springs.

The snowdrift sat in the sauna melting into a puddle of doctrines. I didn’t know what to say. The smells were puzzling. The energy tickled my brain which immediately recruited something to think about. I thought about the radio. The pungency of its shine, the taste of its cyclone.

The current got stronger after the scorpion rain. The wandering ink made its caresses big as throats flopping on a sock. Some things are so obvious it makes you want to molt.

Oh well. Saturday’s scarf is tomorrow’s pillow. Let’s just say that the road is open now and the music is a species of sun.

Harlequin Words

Harlequin words are the laxative the mind needs to liquefy and flow into piccolos and viscera. The harlequin is a figure of perpetual endorsement. Madness in a mule. Misdemeanors of seismic inventory. Imagine a grievance with teeth and a haircut. The quorum is open to lips.

My tendons are happy to do this miscellany. Any time I have a fig newton in my hand I want to be a novel full of underwear. Lingerie and subtleties that occur in italics. Sexual innuendos so large and monumental they make the prerequisite shoulder do things no other shoulder could which is to shoulder the shadow of the moose on the moraine. The wilderness on the tip of my tongue is dripping with fire. I’m principled as a knife. I have the blade of position, the edge of perspective.

One of these days you’re going to come walking through that door and I won’t know what to say. I’m always on patrol. I’m always watching for that rhombus in utter incarnation. The jiggle of meat in salt and oleander. You won’t find any indifference here. I’m not going to coerce anyone into believing that any of this matters. It’s just a nuclear tattoo jacked up on variegation. I recommend the hash browns. But look out for the pancakes. They’re dynamite.

No claim can be too inflated if the immersion is honest and the fingers are willing and the strings on the guitar are flagstones of justice. I presuppose nothing. But I do find that hauling anything can cost money and should be properly secured. When I think of things that a thermometer might represent I feel like soliciting as many opinions as I can, some of the rubber, some of them worthless, some of them haunted and seething.

The sounds are taffy to this form of salt. Oil in the dust coagulating into little green men. Elves, I think. Are we in Ireland suddenly? Is this a word, or a world? Every word is a world. The word is a detail waiting for a sentence to theorize pounds of old thoughts said aloud.

Hysterics are the pyrotechnics of fate.

Although there are other ways to look at this. There always are. Other ways. Theories. Speculations. Goulash and metronomes.

The light of a pearl is a glistening sphere of opulent beauty. I try not to worry about the puddle on my shoulder. I like it when the medium becomes a phenomenon. The camel’s bushy rock confesses to a spinal cord and stands up. We pile up while praying to a cosmetic. Everything is religion. Even the horseradish has a fatuous merit to uphold among the mushrooms.

Marijuana also makes a nice handbag. You can bring it to your visa interview at the U.S. Consulate or gym or favorite restaurant and your introversion will be quenched by symbols. Much of my life has been recorded in rocks and my fedora now swims with radar. The interview was conducted by an ogre, but the view from the window was pleasantly stiff. I paint everything with saffron. It decides what I will do to pulchritude, if there is any geometry I can further advance with my urine.

The human bladder is a place of immense natural beauty. You will love the crows and frog hopper ride. I tend to favor style over content, but you can decide what is true for you and let the rest just crash and burn. Firecrackers will always lisp the patina. Music is so important today that I will spend the entire day walking around the planet in my sweatpants distilling hormones in my little corner of paradise. Forget the walls, it’s the doors that you want to open with your bare hands while your insecurities rustle among your nerves like a school of herring lost in an observatory.  Just smile and wave at the penguins. You’ll be glad you brought a chair. 

So Far

I can’t remember tomorrow. What happened to tomorrow? Tomorrow happened tomorrow. Tomorrow wasn’t yesterday. How could it be? Tomorrow happened before yesterday was tomorrow. Yesterday I could see today. It looked vital and cooked. Today I see tomorrow as a potential happening in whatever way people enter into it and make their decisions and start their cars and sweep their kitchen floors and open their refrigerators and take their kids to school and eat breakfast and remember their youth which is a stuff that becomes history one way or another. An important event or an inconsequential sigh. An old man nodding in an armchair as something historical drifts into vagueness in his mind and I forget that the old man is me and when I open my eyes it’s tomorrow. Meaning now. How did that happen?

“Reflecting on the three ‘temporal ecstasies’ that are the past, the present, and the future, Heidegger says that only when we’re paying attention to it does the "being-been" (rather than the "past") come to our mind and allow us to be ‘present’ to the situation. Future, being-been, present: this is the order of ascendancy in our experience. ‘Being-been is born of the future,’ Heidegger insists. Far from being a ‘not yet,’ the future is ‘the decision’ from which the human being comes to himself - and to his memory of being.

From "I Don’t Remember Tomorrow," by Philippe Nassif. “Eight miles high / And when you touch down / You'll find that it's / Stranger than known.” From “Eight Miles High” by The Byrds.

I try not to look into the future. It doesn’t look good. Ugly, in fact. Horrific. Planet Earth is in peril. The Arctic ice may disappear this year. The weather is already crazy. Floods, fires, hurricanes, typhoons, methane plumes, precipitous decline in insects and songbirds. If there are any humans walking around fifty years from now I’d be heartily surprised. Of course, I won’t be here to be surprised.

I’ve had enough of tomorrow. I want the present to be present as a present and not the shadow of a disastrous future.

What is present to me now is a bed, a cat, a magazine, and a radio.

A lamp, a bloodstream, a spread of fingers, two legs, two feet, thinning hair, mirrors, clothing, books, choices, regrets, memories, suitcases, light, delight, various tinctures of THC, emotions, skeleton, vibrations, inundations, batteries, gravity, space, atmosphere.

In 2007, Keith Richards fell out of a tree in Fiji and required surgery in New Zealand, thus causing the A Bigger Bang tour to extend into 2007.

The Big Bang occurred at around 13.8 billion years ago, cooling sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, atoms, giant clouds of hydrogen and helium, stars and galaxies and The Rolling Stones.

The protagonist here is therapeutic. That would be me. I have to be. I live here.

This is the future. It just arrived. A part of it, anyway. The morning. Pinched, cinched, and wet. It unpacks easily and is wrapped in bubble wrap. The mutations are to be expected. The saffron is long and the theorems are intrepid. The cat is lying on the floor, wondering what’s going on. The future is going on. It seeped into the present and became the past. It wasn’t the future I had in mind but that’s ok. The future is ok. So far.