The Nature Of Here

Words go through my eyes making my thoughts fat and glittery. I think of water. I think of soap. I don’t even know why I should care. My glasses climb my head babbling in mute softness. The lenses are public but the frame is leeward of a nascent headache. This means declaration has eight grounds on which to fricassee. There’s a sky above my head engaged in electricity. Does the sky begin at the ground or at a higher elevation? What would that elevation be? I think this sentence is a wedge of ground. Dirt swimming with worms.

Words. Discharge and flowers. The spin behind everything operates by beard. I can feel a prairie occurring below my chin. My neck is a tunnel of sunlight. My hue is ruminant. My theme is inordinate.

Willow is one form of prayer, rocketry is another. Rock-a-Billy is more like dogs. We’re all apparitions, really, freely emotional handsprings in sheer armchairs. Bubbles in books.

Coffee, in its myriad guises, is often quite jolly in its blackness. Benzedrine is more like parakeets, nervous and colorful. The flowers of anonymity blossom in vermicelli. They smell of the predawn werewolf on a runway in Prague. That is to say raw and desperate. Preternatural, like an ivory guitar played by a miscreant anguish.

I like tea that sends its embrace in songbirds. Shake your hips baby. If I insinuate butter better there’ll be gurgling and splashing when our inner tube race begins in earnest.

Earnest, Tennessee is a sentence assembled in quiet meditation by a crew of elves on the ceiling of a dead ant.

Pretzels are ideas. The hibachi confirms the taste of bruises when the sauna is looped in social vanadium. It’s a metal I wear in undertones of topaz after I get dressed in the auditorium.

There’s so much sloshing when I do this that the whole reason gets sewn in gold thread, which leaves me feeling weighty and a trifle oligarchic. Is it a good feeling? I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe feelings anymore. There are so many of them. Even my intestines get confused. The architecture of liberty is convoluted. Emotions sparkle with the catastrophe of existence, wet and heavy as the Spanish spoken by a wheeze of wallpaper.

Your arm is my rudder. Don’t tease the toad. The toad is thought incarnate. It must hop where it wants, gain favors from the infinitives of consciousness.

What’s this brothel up to, anyway? Is it pretending to be poem or something? Watch that toad, will you, before it gets into all those similes of wool and pilgrimage I keep by the door.

I search for the heat of emergency, urgency, luxuries like analysis and gloves. Disappointment hardens the mop. Mahogany accepts the ethos of neon. It’s a joy to drift around in your bones. There are deviations that slap the ceiling with signification. The circus is constrained to do without houseplants and string. They make do with sawdust and weddings. 

This is a crack drooling with variegation. The currents bring us pleasure. The depth is understanding. The waves are full of fish. My veins are crawling with verdure. The circumstance is classic. The warpaint is sanitary. The ink is piercing, like the rain in Scandinavia.

Think of this as an enigma spitting words. Sputtering. Spotlighting. Sprouting.

When does the Louvre open?

I’m ready. Ready to make a mosaic with sand.

The Flowering Of Subjectivity

You could say poetry is impertinent, futile, vain and narcissistic, a little louche and outmoded, and it would be true, it would be legitimate and veridical, perhaps a little quizzical. But so what? Who didn’t know that at that beginning? Before it all turned into a dystopic, despotic empire of derelict strip malls and opioid addiction. The president is a clown and the vice president is a refrigerator. So then here comes some poetry, awkwardly handling things in the gift shop, inappropriately flirting, farting on the sly, furtively avoiding eye contact. Is someone cooking broccoli? Is there life on Mars? Will there be adequate water in the future? What is the first word to come into your mind when I say California? There are endless cups of coffee in fairyland. But few know the way. It’s principally a matter of smashing all the taboos and finding a good friend.

What’s to become of this world? The sun rises from behind the mountains. Our laptops converge on parsley. Our goulash, sagacious and hot, is a tub of intense semantic activity, a veritable slop of unabashed solipsism. I keep all my paraphernalia in my valise. I forgot the significance of the pig. I forget everything. The shape in the stone is calling to me. Its prophecies fold over me in waves. A violent wind blows over the water. I’m authorized to say what I want. I’ve got the history of Norway engraved on my belt. Consciousness rolls around in my head like a barrel of sodium. The universe tastes like energy, a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference ambles by on a pseudopodium. Go, go, go. Go pseudopodium.

Our poetry is deformed because the world is deformed. It begins with extreme winds and ends with a bonfire. Words are apparitions. I can’t explain their behavior. But I love the shape of propellers. I envision Karl Marx in the British Library, twirling a pencil and thinking in a vein alien to Hegel. Capitalist avarice is just a form of premature senility. Nothing I want ever adds up to a coherent picture of Memphis. It was the insistence on dialectical equilibrium in Hegel’s hermeneutic which has the most immediate and controversial impact on Sun Studio. We call this The Flowering of Subjectivity. It happened when Elvis met John Keats in a dream.

I like collecting clouds. I pull them out of the sky, fold them up and slide them onto closet hangers. Everything gets soaked when the clouds bust open and start to rain. I just pick the rain up and fold it and stick it in a drawer of rainbows. I’ve got a horse, a mannequin and a doughnut. I’ve got a Bluetooth radio, a bedroom lamp with a three-way bulb, and a compulsion to describe the ineffable. Let these words tickle your ears with thoughts of paradise. Everything here is a lie, of course, which makes it all completely true. The universe walks around in my head looking for a place to sit down. Is there a language that can describe this? I’m working on it.

Moon Sugar

Here comes a duodenum, running away from a colonoscopy. And here I am. Here we are. Together at last. Our little secrets burn into the table, terrible and strangely indigo. What can I say? Pain is a difficult business to put down on paper. It has a lot of dimensions. You need a philosophy. A lot of philosophy. A little luck. And a bottle of whiskey. Hedge clippers, Band-Aids, Spinoza. I blow my top when solicitors come to the door. Nobody respects your privacy. Though fewer and fewer seem to require privacy. People have been hollowed out. But who am I to make these judgements? Upon what foundation? Is it my own conception of what is fundamental and essential in modern life? That should be obvious: it’s waffles. Waffles every time.

I crave the power of calamity. The spin of the tornado, the fury of the hurricane, the rhetoric of the unconscious. Can you carry these words to the end of the sentence? Lift your voice and let it come out, all that feeling, like scruples on a string, like the pressure of water in a garden hose. It’s what you do when you have a mouth. You let it out. You let everything out. Thought can alter the world. But so can a monkey with a ducktail and a fake tan. Reality is under siege. What’s to become of this world? You can’t take a single thing for granted. Last night, as I was cleaning out my brain, I stumbled over a universe. I could use a sponge. It made quite a mess.

I like music that’s like a wild animal trying to get out of a cage. Will anything save us? Redeem us? Whatever control I have is illusory. When people forget how to be alone, society falls apart. A big mirror in Deadwood, South Dakota attests to the jocularity in a nook to the back, where the older men play poker and the younger men stare at their smartphones. It’s irritating to have to surrender to the needs of the body. There’ll be an end to that someday. Meanwhile, keep your eye out for Texas. Sunlight kisses our torment. The highway has the emotional value of a vial of nitroglycerin. It keeps the speedometer happy. The needle is stuck in infinity.

The tongue does what it wants. Whatever control I have is illusory. Try navigating in this world. Rain at the airport, a pretty comb in my back pocket. Frank O’Hara is piloting the plane. Delores O’Riordan stands in the dark holding a luminous rabbit. The lesson to be learned is simple: make sure your illusions are light. Fill them with helium. Fill them with sound. Fill them with music. You can trust music. Music is in a war with banality. Our laughter percolates the sadness evident in the ceiling, which is pressed tin, a relic from the past, the sheen of despair in moon sugar. It takes a billion molecules to make a polymer get up and sing like Etta James. A kind of glue holds it all together. Let’s call that glue music. The room is full of it. Even the light is sticky.

Calliope Snow

Experience agrees to its journey, the pencil making marks on plywood. Steam from this morning’s kettle. Grammar in a canoe, the paddles notwithstanding. These are the campaign funds, not the greenhouse. I have language to do and a coconut to throw. The general point is clear: empirical categories dissolve by themselves, and we’re left with a yearning, a maze of footnotes and an elastic volume of air. There is nothing for the recognitions but larch. A scab for the theocracy of ripples, a quadrilateral mold returning in a slow idea of seals. And a moon pinned to my foot like an excerpt of dust and rock.

I turn to reach the conversation before it collapses into slate and the felons issue the usual pontoons. Apparitions seem to get everything wrong. We all need to confront reality, but where is it, where does it make the feather speed through itself? Where does it make the eyes of the peacock sparkle and the coolness under the bridge power the voyage in the violin case? It’s vague to denim a naked leg, but the pleasantries are rooted in potash, which gives the sentence time to ferment a little jaywalking, a listless purification among whose many merits are poise and translucence.

I unrolled some connectedness and the drawing became a hive for lines and cells and drowsy harmonies. The vibration of a thousand tiny wings make honey and a nebula tenable as a stick of coffee. Imagine a pet, a malarkey or a praying mantis. Think of something ovoid, a basement bonfire thematic as a wind instrument, or the people next door disinfecting a vampire. Consider propulsion nearest the spine, then spill it. It can only make things bigger, more like feeling than feet. I bought a climb to the top of a mountain and flashed my kazoo to the wind.

I smear the paint I held so long in the can it became vital. I watched as it slid into oscillation, gurgling glockenspiels like a smock. I now have everything I need to confront the chrome of reality. I sparrow it over the moss, plunge an insoluble sashay into anguish, and feather a pick with cypress.

Technicolor sepals indicate we’re the nimble shadow of a giant grape. I gape at the desk and marry an air of exhaustion to a strain of windchimes. This creates ramification, which is always good for a proverb, logic squashed with a heavy plant.

This is a texture that our twigs invite to candy. I express this by nerve and thumb. My exchange is mustard but my sternum curls naturally around an earphone. Spin the snow and listen to it smell. I feel life happening in the vermilion, the audacity of sprouts in a ligature of orange.

Singing In Silence

Every injury has a moment in which to swallow an egg of knowledge and create a sound for the silence of a shoe, the backdrop of a snowflake, the plumage of a duck, and make it rock, make it rattle, make it talk. A scarf weighs the light and subtlety aspires to the solidity of the hammer. I feel strangely detached from everything chained to simulation. Artifice steals our rope, our ribbon, our presence. The fullness of our wheels, the portent of our steam. The kettle whistles making a grapefruit of the kitchen. I’ve got rubies and gold but none of it sticks to the religion I’m trying to describe with a little glue, a few feathers and a block of stone.

Not to worry: there’s a theater in my skin and a dragon in the garage. Being is all about antifreeze, the eye of the beholder, the crack in the truth of moonlight. Currents of science fiction blossom at the periphery. The only real remedy for distance is the trajectory of remorse, which goes to Borneo and back, bubbling along like a hideous sweater with Darth Vader on it.

Conflagrations at sea. A foundry swallowing men at dawn. These are the things that make sense of a convulsion, that make an assembly of fully mature adults get up and applaud. Think of it as a healthful rupture, a weave, a wave, a yolk in the shamrock of acceptance.

I always get lost looking for a reason, a logic, a rationale for the revelatory gold of Byzantium. It’s always swampy where our suggestions are magnified by crystals and magic. It’s not easy finding burlap when the cuts are sharp and the fabric is fully spread. There are all these holes to consider, little tears and colors assembled in a casual glide through our vowels, qualities of almond in consonants like tongs.

A troika is loaded with pineapples and salt sprinkled near the hill of a sleeping giant. There’s a soft blue light sleeping in a hard blue rock and a history written by footprint in the ooze by the side of the river. A plough splits the earth and flames leap out. The chimera puts on her ski boots. I think it’s time to rent a trailer and rip the sky into little pieces of sport.

The salt coincides with the light hiding in the pineapples. Everything seems linked to an idea of itself, just like a can of shaving cream: the sublime is longer when it lingers in the hand, soft and white and moist, like a kiss of ambiguity, or the tutelage of twilight. This is called flannel, or how to resolve the problem of agriculture.

The past stumbles into a paperweight and liberates a cloud of words. A sheet of paper catches everything nebulous and allusive and tossed by the side of the road. The fuller development of our dreams offers us the savor of mushrooms and melts it into calculus. Thursday turns out to be significantly larger than the chameleon crawling on my hand, which invites further speculation, struts and wings and a meridional imagery that I can use later to describe a collarbone.

I hope the manure doesn’t ruin our appreciation of apricots. Is it any less thematic to enter a café and order a cup of reminiscence and drag it across the sacrament of eating? In a word, yes. The hammer eventually persuades the nail to enter the wood. And the vertebrae charm the pants off of a xylophone. It’s how everything redeems the neon of alternative and provokes reverie. I know whereof I speak. Ebony supports the significance presumed living in the barometer. Contrariety rattles down the road and the barge awaiting us in the canal is magnificent. And we walk toward it, singing in total silence. 

Watermelon Bats

The small amount of coffee remaining in my frosted and dotted Yayoi Kusama mug is still a little warm and I take a big gulp. I listen to Blackberry Smoke sing “One Horse Town” on YouTube as I read an online article about the dying of bigleaf maple in the American west. Scientists don’t know why this is happening. But it’s happening everywhere. Bigleaf maples are in decline. They think it’s got something to do with climate change.

D’ya think?

The maples under the McGraw Street bridge in Wolf Creek Ravine all look sickly, their leaves coated with a greenish-brown discoloration. It’s mid-October and the leaves aren’t even changing into the usual fall colors of yellow and orange. The signs of planetary, ecological distress are everywhere, and they’re not good: methane emissions in the waters of the eastern Arctic are causing the water to boil; atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have now exceeded 410 parts per million; the rapid ice melt in Greenland is causing the Atlantic Ocean’s meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to slowdown; 80% of the world’s insects and birds have vanished. And so on.

Meanwhile, I’ve never seen so many babies. There are babies everywhere. They’re as ubiquitous as Uber and numerous as goobers. Every day I see men and women pushing baby buggies down the sidewalk. When it comes to human reproduction, it’s been pedal to the metal. People are popping babies out like popcorn. And they love bringing these monsters to restaurants where we can all hear them crying and running around screaming their heads off.

I remember one afternoon out running as we approached a small Mexican restaurant with several tables outside a man and a woman changing a baby’s diapers in close proximity to the other table where people were eating. I’d have a tough time dipping a corn chip into guacamole if I were sitting there. The memory itself is welcome to leave any time it wants.

R believes – more charitably and kindly than my take on the situation – that this rash of human reproductivity is because people are anxious and desperate for some kind of normality. There’s nothing like a family to make one feel secure and happy. At least until the babies grow into teenagers and applying to schools like Harvard or joining the military in order to get financing for a school like Harvard, or sulking in the basement looking up guns and explosives on the Internet.

Reproduction is a powerful instinct. I’ve never had that particular instinct, but I’ve got to believe that that’s a reality for a lot of people: the transmission of human chromosomes into the future. And who knows, maybe one of these kids will be the genius to figure out how to restore balance to the planet.

Or more importantly become a farmer. A genius farmer able to grow crops in increasingly difficult circumstances. Plough her fields with Percherons. Power greenhouses and irrigation systems with windblown turbines and polycrystalline solar panels.

In California, PG&E – after being blamed for sparking 17 out of 23 major fires across the sate in 2017 and 2018, one of which destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people – cut power to millions of people due to their own incompetency and filing for bankruptcy.

Jesus. Why aren’t the people in California in the streets screaming bloody murder? The outage is an outrage.

I should ask myself a few questions as well. Such as, why am I writing this? What’s the point of writing at all if people don’t read and there will be no libraries or universities in a future of carbonized forests and barren radioactive wastelands in which the sixth mass extinction has run its full course and all that is left of humanity are a few tribes of cannibalistic zombies miming old Mad Max movies around the campfire?

Shit, I don’t know. Writing is like reproduction. It’s a compulsion, a driving force, flames from the back of a rocket pushing this sentence further into space. When it reaches a habitable planet it will land and sink its roots down deep and grow into a giant watermelon.

We will make a giant palace out of that watermelon and when we’re done eating the moist, sugary contents of the watermelon we’ll spit the seeds out on the surface of our new planet, the planet I just created with words, the same words I used to make a palace out of watermelon, and whose seeds took root and became a field of watermelons, a planet of watermelons, a galaxy of watermelons, watermelon comets and watermelon stars, watermelon elevators and watermelon cars, watermelon gas and watermelon hats. Watermelon caverns. Watermelon bats.

Tender Surrender

I’m somewhere offshore fishing for metaphors I’m feeling somehow insoluble a sentence percolating commas carp in the shallows of the Mississippi it’s great to write across the span of time the joy of watching words appear and then swim away while heavy metal explosions come from the stage I approve of this stew this is where the search begins

We extend our best wishes to the visible invisible the news today is quite disturbing a nine-year old white-tailed eagle named Victor equipped with a 360-degree camera mounted on his back soared above Mont Blanc on a mission to raise awareness of melting glaciers and other effects of global warming the glaciers are melting at an incredible speed and soon there will be no water to feed the rivers and streams of Europe and Asia the glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating and thinning the Chaturangi glacier is retreating at a rate of about 22 meters per year

I sail along the coast pretty as a thumb this mode of sorcery has its peculiarities a pencil bumps into a drawing there’s some mustard on my shirt this sandwich could use a coat of paint I say and polish some sleep until it shines like a dream I’ve got testicles spectacles tentacles and a mystical vegetable named Henry to feed my fiduciary constancy the darkness walks into France with a basket of residual emotions I’m simple a simple man with a simple willingness to mature into locomotion I like to drink the milk of structure the surface of the desk is an oasis for my elbows I feel a stirring in my heart and hear the moan of a broken sky

I’m plunged into ferment F-bombs in an old barn tools are crucial we strongly recommend ivy a fragment of sound like the smell of coffee the color green is perpetual we also offer a complimentary continental breakfast strong coffee and a big fat doughnut I see a storm coming time moves forward never backward why is that as we approach Utah I see an arch of sandstone Hopi dancing the pahlikmana everything has an essence or a life force and we must interact with these or fail to survive invoke them in dance invoke them in chants and songs invoke them in stone and wood the maple succeeds at barking the distance is remarkable and expansive as choice the horizon squirms like a thought in an old brain

I see calculus unfolding on a blackboard the package hugs itself the wind blows through my tan I echo like a canyon water running through a hose the hibachi triumphs in comparison with a stove I’m pounding nails I’m joining wood I’m joining words I’m building a birdhouse a wordhouse a lousehouse I enkindle candles on a chocolate cake while the bistro discharges a rumbling saffron I feel a sense of burden but it’s too vague to carry I just feel it sense it and sometime after breakfast digest it I see methane boiling out of a northern sea this is disturbing a man dancing on a highwire 2,000 feet above the city streets a little ancestry could do us some good I’m in a bit of a panic don’t know where to go the nipple is a riddle but if an emotion rolls around I just grab it I find pleasure wherever I can get it I do handsprings on pink stationary pull things out of the air and put them on paper

The faster you go the slower the clouds scud the time has come to draw some blood anticipate rain bring it on I could murder a peach the drawer is full of string what’s the meaning of this a goat is so many things it’s like the sparkle of an engagement ring a handful of bright silver coins our connectedness is disconnecting dreams roam our brains like animals I see a new day riding on the finger of a ghost wheat fields changing hue as the wind blows through I glue words to the air and hope they stick a gargantuan organ in a French cathedral plays Bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor tonight we’ll swim across the river and try to find some peace on the other side the coast is a dim variegation in the future of a tender surrender