Cuckoo

Alienation is not the sole characteristic of art. There’s also the scratch of coincidence. The assembly of things. Please lend me your eyes. I will take them on a journey to the end of this sentence. My distress is a big red caboose attached to a train of languid hysteria. The seats provide a biography for my fingers, which are batons of happy geometry. Nevertheless, my Great Refusal, taken as a whole, is set afloat on a sea of words. I grow oceanic. So I’ll just go ahead and say it: thermometer thunder. Frog plop. The smell of snow. Everything becomes silent before a storm. And that’s where we’re at now. Hanging on till the next minute. As always.

We echo one another, we’re not isolated monads. My subjectivity doesn’t end at my skin, it begins at my skin. The same heart beating in me beats in you. I sing myself & celebrate myself for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. But is there a tangible relation between language & external reality? Yes and no. Either way, nobody’s going to give a shit. Most people avoid reality. It’s the sensible thing to do. Reality hurts. Illusion is its sad consolation prize. Language is available to surround our nuclear selves with narratives & context. I entered life as I found it, visceral & wet & surrounded by Minneapolis. Later, I discovered nocturnal emissions. Everything else is sighs. Be gentle. But go. Crawl to the door and bang on it hard.

I found the sound I was looking for. It was hiding in a can of turpentine disguised as a strong odor. Hibachi sizzle. Exultation wrapped in Guyana. Windows cooking coffee. A man laughing at a map. I succeed at pink & the mimes light the night on fire. I endure by making emotion float in syntax. I’m shoving some hair across my head without confusing any sounds up there. I explode into worms. If I increase my perspectives I will anchor near Marseille & be awakened by feather. The pulleys creak as we draw the sky closer. I feel the energy of sand. The brush of Cezanne.

Olivier Messaien is sitting at a colossal organ playing Quatuor pour la fin du temps. There’s a large animal growling beneath the music. The problem that’s been nagging me is the usual one: meaning. How to create meaning, destroy meaning, stroke meaning, make meaning shameless as a dream. I awake & open my eyes & consciousness floods into my head. Thinking is a strange activity. I’m the ghost that haunts myself. Sometimes I say things that are the opposite of what I feel. And sometimes I don’t understand the universe at all. You can see it without seeing it & feel it without feeling it. But in the end, you’ll find everything in the basement.

This is me drifting through time. I’m the entire cuckoo. Waves lapping the shore. So, first you’re here, & then you’re there, which is a displacement through the Seattle Art Museum. You can’t grow & harvest crops in a climate casino. You need art to make things go bananas. And then it happens: hammers. So that’s it, that’s pretty much my story. Dirt. And so I became a dumbfuck.  It’s why I developed a big vocabulary: words can disguise ugly realities.  And later in life, when I got all those shit jobs, I learned that beauty has convulsions & that the first among them is a Fender Stratocaster. I feel the lift of a powerful emotion, I don’t know what it is, but the walls are burning down. Metamorphism swarms with energy. I see soap in a brown soap dish & think a walk will do us good. Genres can be mingled. I’m a voice beside the ground. And talk to auks. 

Crocodile

Each day I’m out for a run I pass a small art gallery called The Fountainhead. There’s a bronze sculpture in one of the windows that intrigues me: an old woman with a bare torso and a short skirt rides a crocodile. Her breasts are immense. They’ve lost their firmness and hang – outlandishly huge and abundant – from an aging but formidable frame. How many children have suckled at those formerly soft, voluminous rotundities? How many sorrows have been comforted there? There’s something iconic about her. Something regal and strong. The piece is titled “African Queen.” I assume this is no allusion to John Huston’s celebrated movie but an intimation of power. The sculpture is a different kind of narrative. Is the woman a figure from African mythology? Why is she riding a crocodile? I look for a clue in her facial expression, which is one of great subtlety, disclosing a gentle, vague, Mona Lisa smile, suggesting a rapport with the creature beneath her and a calm, reciprocal correspondence with the earth and its inhabitants. She’s very much at ease, awakened and serene, as if riding a crocodile were as routine as getting behind the wheel of a Subaru Forester and making a trip to the supermarket. One hand rests on her thigh, the other on the rough back of the crocodile. There’s no hurry, no menace, no predation. It’s Edenic and amiable, an eye-catching fable of breasts and teeth.

Normally, I go for a run in the afternoon, but on the morning of Christmas Eve day I woke up at 4:00 a.m. feeling agitated and angry. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I decided to take advantage of that energy and go for a run before sunrise. Burn the anger out of me by running in the cold. And dark. I won’t have to stop and feed crows. I could feed them later in the day, I could go for a walk instead of a run. It’s more fun that way. I can feed them at leisure.

We’ve developed a relationship. A rapport. I’m used to the crows flying past my head so close I can feel the air from their wings brush over my face and ears. I get to the McGraw Street Bridge that goes over Wolf Creek Ravine and a big bird flies in front of me. But it’s not a crow: it’s an owl. The owl perches on a nearby limb and watches as I run by.

I enjoy the Christmas decorations. Some houses go all out and are festooned in multi-colored squiggles of twinkly bulbs and fingers and loops of numinous joy. A few are more casual, make some gestures, a string of lights hung from a porch like a seasonal afterthought. And some are completely blank. We’re done with Christmas. We’re going to stand back and let it stress out the rest of the population. Kick back get stoned and watch TV.

Why am I feeling so angry? I can’t say why. There are so many reasons it’s tedious to go into it. Anomie, corporate greed, denial. Take your pick. I defer to Greta Thunberg. She speaks with greater eloquence than I can. I get choked on my own bile. I sputter and blink and steam comes out of my ears. Sometimes silence is more effective than shouting. And sometimes running at five a.m. in the December black brings a little temporary relief. It helps keep that animal anger in its cage, appeased with a nice warm shower, assuaged with waffles and syrup. Keeping that intensity at bay requires strategy and restraint. Anger is unpredictable. You need cunning and guile. A little control. Agency and style. You don’t want to push it down too hard and you don’t want to let it loose. It’s a lot like riding a crocodile. Don’t kick it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t let it get sneaky and toxic and slink. Just let it waddle forward and swallow the next asshole with a smile and a wink.

Carousing In Parousia

People like the idea of freedom better than actual freedom because actual freedom is terrifying. One is always walking a narrow rope bridge over chasms of Peruvian mystery and the cold of the universe blowing up your ass. This is how I learn. I crack a metaphorical egg and look at the contents and feel around in some art for a council of bones. A goose quill in a Boston attic.  Nothingness in a first aid kit. Burlap sacks entrusted to a hook on the wall. Why is reality always happening to me? I can feel these words make a house of language. I stretch out like a chain of clouds in a king size bed. Sex comes in waves winking slippery ideas like a Florida clitoria.

I’m not hostile to religion. I’m hostile to its dogma, but not its incense. Or hot dogs. Vatican hot dogs are delicious. But expensive: a family from Puglia were recently shocked to get a tab for 132 dollars for three hot dogs, a sandwich, & five sodas at a café on the Via Della Conciliazione. There’s always something. Corruption, overpriced hot dogs, or wading knee-deep in Venice with a Gucci bag. Get to know your inner demon. Shake hands with the darkness. I love the voice of Yvonne Elliman. It’s a religious feeling. But it’s also where the mind finds its energy present to itself in bodily sensation. It feels gold, like a crack in the wall letting the sunlight through.

Nietzsche saw pleasure & pain as a false & unimportant polarity. I see them as chisels. We need to carve some shapes out of the air. Make the invisible visible. Marie Laurencin juggles spheres of color in a corner of the living room. None of us resort to abstraction at times like this. We just sit back & signal one another with winks & nods. Epistemology leads to well-being. Ontology helps us ski. But is oblivion a chasm in the wall, or an energy strutting across my tongue like a drunken prostitute? Is it kosher to curse at life & the universe like Shakespeare’s King Lear, or calmly put everything away & run to the car & wait for the rain to stop? Is reality a toad or a ukulele? I have no idea. I just drop the nouns where they’re most needed & hope for the best.

I don’t know how to feel about mannequins. I want to punch their lights out. Where am I headed with this? I’m a barbarian. There are no stars in this abstraction. Just gloves & candy. The sentence is gathered in mirrors. Each word surges into universes of color. My belt buckle is loud but I admonish nothing. Why would I? The TV expects us to watch it. We give it a try. Its images blaze into us like a Michael Bay movie, convincing us of capitalism. I’m a stranger to this world. So I keep writing. Butterflies tie my shoes while the sky walks around in my head. The surge falls out of my jalopy. No one wants to hear heavy metal this early in the morning. Am I too old to write poetry? I take a romantic position, & crawl toward you loaded with books.

This Is What We Do

Poets need not enchant the world because the world doesn’t need re-enchantment, but must fight against those who are drying it up with platitudes & rationality. I blow on my fingers & wait for the sun to rise in the east. I believe that feeling can be expanded by toppling the pillars of the Philistine’s temple & that when the rhythms of Bo Diddley meet the investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein John Keats gets up to dance. Life is mostly just a satori of awkward recognitions. We go from belligerency to apology & hold the door open for parables. Honesty is more entertaining than mirrors, but it’s hard to live with. This is what we do when we talk about the world. We assemble a new reality with rags & chemistry & spill poetry on people.

I’ve got a notebook teeming with irritations. Here comes one now: a body of water clanking toward us in chains of imaginary fish. I see your eyes sifting through all the reasons for ignoring these words & doing something else. I can’t blame you. Eight pounds of language slid out of my mouth as soon as I entered this paragraph & I had no idea what to do with any of it. Should I take it to Goodwill? Paint it red? Feed it pessimism & hamburger? Unsatisfactory. So I sat down & wept tears of antique Andalusian porcelain. I don’t suffer indignities well. Adjusting to life in the 21^st century can require a little fortitude & patience. But when I saw my clothes running down the street I decided to inflate myself with 900 pounds of nitrous oxide & float back into the sky.

It seems to me that my mind is separate from the world, but I know that’s wrong. Otherwise, why would I be surrounded by porous external boundaries & otherworldly beings? Reality is mostly peanut butter. Interrelationships and balloons. Peter Green with a piece of cheese in his hair. Terence McKenna is the guy you want to go to for information on psychedelic experience. Also, the essays in Michael McClure’s Meat Science Essays. Planet Earth is a long walk in a blue palace. My stethoscope is pressed against the night. It’s adorably hypnotic. For example, this can be a kitchen if you want. And what is thought? I think it’s a package of new underwear.

Everything manipulates a color today. The urge to make a shape is rivers. I warp into nouns. Jingle them on a highway. The limousine is a naked mind. I extrude a bewildered destination. I’ve painted twelve elves on a bone & appreciate what it is to ooze a valentine in a little butter. I feel iron. The grapes bring us perceptions of another world. If I’m plump when I’m old does it matter? I wash my face with the tears of the moon. I can hear the gallop of horses & arrange my speech according to the emotions I feel below the technology of your breasts. The hammer is defined by its use. But the nails are awakened by chickenpox, & the house is still alive.

Season's Greetings

The season stuck out like a pulpit. Something had to be done about the patina. And so I went in search of perfume. The libretto rankled with iconoclasm. But the maggots shifted gently in their abstraction. Revulsion is in the mind of the caretaker. Sometimes it helps to duplicate a pity. Nowhere is it written that a newscast must master the slogans of odor. The truth is often so obvious, so glaring, so creamy and unanimous that it makes perspective creak with photographs. Must I always presuppose that the opacity of olives is something vaguely attached to reality, or is reality just a polyamorous demonstration of silverware? That’s when the stationary shop closed. Usury thrived in suede and the outlets turned seismic with zodiacal moss. No one is indifferent to polecats. The landslides are reflexive and good for our intemperance, which is just another way of saying paleontology. And to think the chickens are all nominally symphonic is pure distortion, the kind I like, the kind that sits on your lap huffing and puffing like a ventriloquist.

The flag is succinct as a lollipop, but the nation it serves is ponderous in loops of ribbon. Think of Christmas. Think of trinkets. The toys and shadows of despair. The stencils of tribulation. The mystic bows her head in thought and the judge’s gavel comes down hard on a macadamia nut. Judgements are preponderately gray. Which is to say, the punishment should fit the stenographer. Hysteria is largely subjective, though its trusses are pratfalls of elfin offal. Leather is the snivel of darts. Geometry in a corner solving itself with kleptomania. Cubes are just squares with fat corners and jet-propelled isotopes. The mustache is never just a mustache. It’s also a patronage of food snacking on the upper lip.

The millionaire’s suffix pepper has indicated my shoes. This means hatchets, which are ontologically necessary for decimals. It’s the little things in life that stain our sombrero. I command you to get out of the porthole and do something about the varsity. Inappreciable vapors congregate in the cadence I’m using to suffer the world in general. I do this for the sake of piquancy. The rhythms are modeled on prattle, the kind of resurrection supported by iconoclasts. I’m not domineering but I do like to drive tractors around in pornography and fling humidity at the judges. If your mind is underwater you should learn to sell real estate to the hermit crabs. I’ve had enough of your germination. The Seine was never sentimental. It was always bubbling with vulvas and showed us how to inseminate the afternoon with themes of melodious limbo.

It’s ticklish to spotlight a puny mischance if the geology is listening and the spice is viscous with news. Therefore, I must masticate shale. I shall shatter shale with sentences of sticky convection. The formula cries for guests. Please come to my patina. I grieve for the Pullman whose pumpernickel is floppy. It’s not the democracy that counts it’s the fireside chat. Let me be a trapezoid for the moisture of your hope. The tunnel has been hurled at the painting in my voice. Even the gymnastics will confirm the mutation, especially as it has been introduced by hors d’oeuvres of wry and epigrammatic wiring. The kind that separates light into colors and then walks out of the mouth dressed in words.

Most junk is decent. We just think it’s junk because the encrustations overwhelm the restrictions with preternatural aplomb. Introspection is the refuge of tans. I pray for the corona of the rodeo hog. Theories illumine the cerebellum with wallabies. I feel so waxy when I festoon the mince with nightclubs. Just blow that horn. The decorations will follow, passing through the firmament like overly medicated viceroys.

I want the Christmas trimming to resemble the entrails of a derelict explosion. The smell of paper adds a twist of stoicism.  Even the reptiles are agitated. There are too many taboos. Who needs them? We walk over the lava singing Neil Young songs. The search for joy mutates into a Gila monster. I embrace the silence of the muffin. And then put butter on it. I never fully understood the Futurists. Is it sometimes emptier to say something when nothing needs to be said or more fulfilling to get drunk & acquit oneself of inarticulate demands by falling out of your head? This isn’t the emotion I had in mind, but it’ll do until Bukowski slides down the chimney. 

Urban Embolism

I hate driving in Seattle. To say Seattle is overcrowded is a gross understatement. Seattle is insanely overcrowded. There’s no margin of error when you’re out on the road. None. Not a bit. Let your mind wander one critical inch from its focus on all the chaos and impending threats around you and the next sound you’re going to hear is the crunch of metal on metal. You’ve got to be hypervigilant each second of the way. And by hypervigilant I mean wide-wake, jazzed, circumspect, fast on the draw, maybe a little goosed by panic, sweat trickling down your neck. Except, of course, for those many occasions in which you’re stuck in traffic and not moving at all. Frozen in space and time. Your mind and head assaulted by someone’s idea of music: the thump! thump! thump! emanating from the leviathan four-by-four next to you.

I used to enjoy the kind of daydreaming that driving sometimes inspires. The trances induced by the hum of the engine, the music playing on your radio or CD player, the pleasant sensation of having a goal, a direction, a reason to be living your life, grasping the wheel of a car, participating in the general pageantry of piston and gas and that wonderful phenomenon of forward motion called momentum. I love momentum. The only thing I like better than momentum is inertia. But inertia can get old. Momentum hardly ever gets old. It’s the very nature of momentum to present you with something new each moment. Each moment of momentum. Momentum isn’t a moment momentum is a hectic interplay of moments.

I remember when you could travel anywhere in Seattle with relative ease. Rush hour downtown was the closest I ever came to gnarly traffic entanglements and stress. Most days and nights Seattle’s streets could be navigated with broad accommodation and expediency. That disappeared with the incredible affluence that began pouring into Seattle in the mid to late 90s, and then exploded in the new millennial. Seattle’s infrastructure has not kept up with the frenzy of construction undermining civic equilibrium. What was once a relatively easygoing city of pretty parks and funky coffeehouses has become a festering canker of neoliberal rapacity, income inequality, homelessness, rampant corruption and a stressed and crumbling infrastructure.

This is pretty much the norm now in all the coastal cities, perhaps worse in the less affluent cities of the deep south and Midwest and rust belts of New England.

Late Monday afternoon R and I get in the car to go to Best Buy near Northgate to get a new charger cable for my tablet and a new DVD player. The traffic on Mercer is mercifully – and surprisingly – free of traffic. This is most unusual for a weekday afternoon. But then when I make my right onto Aurora – an insanely busy arterial full of stressed, hot-tempered, aggressive drivers – I encounter a tow truck picking up a stalled car, hoisting it up onto a flatbed. This prohibits me from picking up speed and joining the flow of traffic. I have to stop and wait my turn to get into the left lane. I have a bit of luck; there are no immediate cars. I maneuver left and pick up speed and stay safely ahead of the traffic behind me. But then I have another problem. The bus just ahead of me starts without warning to move right. The driver either doesn’t see me or sees me and doesn’t care. I brake and let the bus – an articulated bus – get far enough ahead that he doesn’t force me off the road. And for the third time, I manage to get into the left lane and pick up speed and enter the flow of traffic. The rest of the way is not without its hazards but is otherwise uneventful. We get to Best Buy, make our purchases, and take 105^th back to Aurora, make a right on 85^th, a left on 15^th NW, a right on West Emerson Street and park in the lot in front of the Fisherman’s Terminal. We go to Chinook’s for dinner. The host – a tall young man with long hair done up in a bun – seats us at a table by the window. We prefer sitting at one of the booths, but it’s crowded, so we settle for the table. A few of the boats outside in the marina are festooned in Christmas lights.

It’s nice to relax and eat dinner after the stress of driving. I gaze at the headlights streaming across the Ballard Bridge, take a bite of bread, then shift my attention toward the woman in the booth across from us nursing a newborn while eating dinner. She’s an unusually large woman, as is her bearded husband seated across from her, and the infant is so tiny, swaddled in blankets, oblivious to the circumstances it will one day have to negotiate and occupy. I can’t remember consciousness at that stage of life. What’s to remember? Sleep and hunger. The warmth of a human body. Those things never go away. They just get lost in traffic.

The Book Of Winter

How many pages is the book of winter? I don’t know, but it proves that I have a fascination for cactus. It’s also why the lettuce is kept moist at the supermarket. Winter isn’t theory. Winter is a cup of real dice, relics of ice, the eerie silence of snowfall. Much of what I know I know from winter. Winter is the book whose dialectic is dipped in propane. Whose language electrifies the nectar at the back of the neck as it undulates up and down the spine, causing lucidity & shock.

Cactus, like winter, is obdurate. Its punch is in its estrangement, its absolute aloofness. The cactus thrives in desolation. Winter thrives in desolation. Lack becomes prodigal. Deprivation becomes abundance. The big holidays are in winter. The desert is quieter and cooler in the winter. There’s less heat and more life in evidence. Desert bighorn butting heads. Black cardinals flitting by.

Cactus needles slow the drying wind. The Sonoran desert toad excretes 5-Methoxydimethyltryptamine. Nothing is ever clear-cut. There’s always paradox, and its younger cousin, irony. Agreement exaggerates disagreement. Discord ignites discourse. Discourse awakens the spirit of intercourse. Which is communion. Which is fusion. Which is legion. Which is cohesion. We find the sugar of exchange is everywhere the forsythia finds its criteria complicit in civet.

I want Christmas this year to drive around whistling a slow desire. We all try to convince the world that our desires are fundamental constituents of matter, such as wax, or crowbars, or the cornfields of Iowa. But really, they’re just bits of bits of sound mediated by turquoise.

The kitchen sink folds into candlelight. I’m going to see if the undertaker is still alive. The novel focuses on the laziness of the snowball. Jelly provides consciousness for the paragraph, which is based on shellac. The abdominals are limestone and float our eyes in a windshield monasticism worthy of Jack Kerouac. The reptiles are agitated, and the reservoir is housing a benevolent pope, who is waving his hand at us. What shall we make of this? The ghost of Marie Laurencin juggles mimosas. The search for ocher offers us Gila monsters and granite. My trajectory opens a chasm in the wall where a peacock struts across Nebraska like nouns in a sentence made of monkeyshines.

Clearly, flakes are sadder than knots. They fall mournfully from a knot of words I’m using to hold the world in place. Our cat has mutated into a perfect copy of Charles Bukowski, and sits in the window muttering “gravity is an invisible force.” This is correct. It is linked to the balm of a divine presence in the animal kingdom. There’s a frog on the kitchen window sill with his mouth wide open. He appears to be singing. But no sound is coming out. Why would it?  It's a ceramic frog. Here’s something else I think about: silk pajamas with a bird’s trachea racing up and down the nucleus of a jalapeño. This causes panties and is shy as a police officer in love with a mammogram.