Coming To Terms With Eric Clapton's Nose

I watch a concentric bug with a prosthetic proboscis walk across the sill I like to sit by the window some people write some people sing I’m an embodiment of sugar I learned to hide my emotions deep behind my ribs it all sounds equilateral I’m curious about this music the human ear is a strange organ the tangential is tantalizing can you define reason

I’m not affiliated with any religion or ideology I want to seize the stars the camaraderie of the workplace is easily exploited why does pizza make people so happy the window in my heart opens on a landscape of error I have a tendency to wallow in remorse & put it in my hair like a big primate in an Alfred Jarry story

I like the feeling of an oar in my hands illusions float in the brain like birch bark canoes I like to crush aluminum cans the artist must work in solitude I never dreamed you could get tired of ice cream the limestone is charming words sparkling with lucidity I learned to throw knives in the circus I sometimes found refuge in alcohol this is the story of a mind flags rely on symbols but they all flap in the wind think about that think about Eric Clapton’s nose it seems to have gotten smaller over the years or did his face get bigger who cares

Arizona flies through my head maps fascinate me money kills the exquisite sense of life the blues agree with me my arm hurts when I reach into the cupboard to get a jar of peanut butter I’m building a spaceship with rubber bands & tinfoil

Isn’t it strange to live in a body the trees begin to blossom the melancholy sound of a train in the fog echoes a woman drinking water from a garden hose how is aluminum made it’s a long slow process to accept hard realities like dying or oligarchy a man playing the harmonica in the Dordogne replenishes the spirit with hawks

My arm falls asleep & I have to let it hang at the side of the bed to get the blood to recirculate eating is strange you put living matter in the mouth chew it digest it it becomes muscle & thought it becomes meat & meaning the architecture of music involves flutes ambiguity is the sauce of reverie I like the heave of waves

I often have a problem getting my keys out of my jeans pocket loose change comes with it & sprinkles on the ground I never cease to marvel at the strength of steam intensity is discouraged in our society a tube of midnight blue squeezed by an old woman’s hand I suffer from hyperacusis & am preoccupied by food insecurity it’s always cold at the supermarket I love peanut butter & jelly sandwiches the airplane sighs & moves forward possession is a total irreality

An orange is a distillation of sunlight the greater the vocabulary the greater the reality my mouth is a suitcase linen isn’t just a word it’s a fabric a fabrication a feeling folded & put in a closet the frame is at least half the image rivers are beings each day I notice a new wrinkle plantar fasciitis is a bitch what more can I say the armchair emanates the comfort of sitting in it the glow of gold at the bottom of a lake words overlap the border between the real & the unreal here in the U.S. you’re evaluated according to how much money & property you possess so does it matter if the scenery along the highway is beautiful no because it’s not going to be there long

Inspiration is just a matter of breathing the universe in the human body is full of water & salt it’s our duty to appreciate the value of rumination then let it go not everything happens in sequence brain waves float the language of the sun a dream of iron salutes the mountain at dawn life is unpredictable you can’t define everything with a beer mug the thumb is the chandelier of the hand the plough revolutionized agriculture & there you have it the impregnable politics of the polka dot I do push-ups & trumpet the piquancy of rhubarb stick figures walking on paper it’s a pornography of linguistic pricks small wounds expressed by spit & polish until the limits dissolve & the universe comes flooding in  

Go Ahead Spit It Out

Go ahead spit it out the splendor of Mallarmé is in the boomerang the elliptical the oblique the allusive the revelatory & the trapeze swings back & forth with nobody on it I listen to French radio in the morning it helps to find people of similar interests speaking a language different from that spoken by last night’s furniture dancing around the room like mirrors ribbon tossed in celebration everything in the Mallarméan universe is broken & fragmented because the words are so strained & contorted by the intense push toward the jubilant arbitrariness of the night sky they’re so hungry to ingest

Age is a development toward deeper understanding I never underestimate the convenience of the extension cord Anubis drives the bus there was a time when conversations were a form of chamber music imagine the wind with elbows

I remember driving to the dump on Fridays the sparkle of frost on a January morning Bob Dylan Barbara Lewis Lou Christie lightning is striking again each word is multilayered and clanks the sting of an insect is a form of conversation the skin of a drum can be rubbed into softness we see hummingbirds sometimes a bottle of tornadoes high on the shelf we’re all trapped in a cage of our own making

I live in a port city the limestone is an eventual feeling can you feel the universe swimming in your veins I’m a table today I’m feeling flat multicolored snakes writhing on a snow shovel

I’ve got a swimming pool on my mind the subtle rustle of gauze in a Central American jungle I’m going to toss it to you this sentence is striving for diplomacy Stephane Mallarmé throwing dice in a Tegucigalpa bar

Redeem the face of conflagration I’m already gone in my head the helium morning awakens the leaden meaning of sleep it’s a hard line to walk

Let me chew on that a while the sentence is a cocoon of idea the mastoid is the bone behind the ear we’re all depending on a system that’s killing us I got this sound from a beef bone commodification poisons the inner beauty of things spectacular events in an armchair sunlight diffused in a curtain

Can you introduce me to your elevator a carload of rubes from Redding threw a beer can at me as I crossed the Sacramento river I should’ve gone back to get it take a big gulp there’s salt & pepper in the cupboard but you’ve got to know what you’re doing evocation is at the heart of the screw

Mustard is a stimulating word the world is full of them big words little words fat words thin words if I personify a clock does it help make time more intimate no not really but what the hell it’s only breath & sound I spend half my day moving phlegm around

The sternum is a bone joining the ribs of the chest there’s an eyeball pinned to the end of this sentence the faucets are widespread mounts I was hitchhiking from San José to Seattle when I discovered the enchantment of mistakes the world is becoming increasingly stiff rigid cold & hostile the crows all gathered on a telephone line about 20 feet above me cawing their heads off they were trying to warn me of something this is getting serious I learned to play cards in Sioux City conversions sometimes happen slowly over time sometimes all at once when you least expect it things evolve slowly but inevitably we live in a time of extreme confusion upon spiritual matters but spring is coming I see spots & expand my interpretation of glass to include the glamour of two big eyes glowing with mischief

It’s a bit weird to be at the end of one’s life it affects one’s psychology that’s for sure there are 20 bones in the human foot each one doing something clever & flexible I became athletic late in life the greenish debris is the subconscious of the junkyard I’ve never liked horns as much as strings & percussion I have a map of your eyes a 93 year old man walking gingerly with ski poles let us join our hands in prayer I’ve learned to read the faces of the other players we’re stuck in a small apartment in an expensive city description is lumber constant interruptions caused by bodily needs an old oak desk penetrates infinity what is it that makes the skin of the lips different than skin in general wrapped as it is all around the body keeping all the organs in alchemy bursts into beams of light the springs of our mattress squeak & there are so many things you can do in the air breathe & talk & sing & fly & leap from branch to branch the runway is clear you can take off now

Philosophy Dog

I like illusions. Life is terrifying without them. I’m also a fan of cognitive dissonance, denial, rationalization, & self-deception. I’m not big on hope. Hope leads, inevitably, to disappointment. The smear in my heart is the hope left over from the last hope. Epiphanies are where it’s at: the manifestation of the divine. A hummingbird hovering in front of your face on a warm spring day surrounded by azaleas & rhododendrons. A sudden acute realization that everything is simultaneously real & unreal, particle & wave, energy & matter. Radiant knots of language pickled in reveries of sound. Whipped cream hissing out of a pressurized can. And somewhere near the horizon the light of the morning star & steam rising off the surface of a river.

Every injury has a moment in which to stick to a religion & describe itself with a little glue, a little glee, & a block of stone. Being is all about conflagrations at sea. Somebody coughing in a movie theater. Everything seems linked to an idea of itself, just like agriculture, always growing things out of the dirt, as if the very dirt had a reason to enter the sacrament of eating. It’s precisely this dynamic for producing a veneer of meaning that gets bumped into Costa Rica. Are you hungry? Please don’t eat me. These are but furbelows, shiny ideas opened by an elf named Sphygm. The only way out is in, & the only way in is to spin there on the Boulevard of Crime.

Words like it when they can bend the world into baseball. There’s a loud whack & the ball bounces to left field where it is caught by a pterodactyl & carried to the end of this sentence & dropped. I pick it up & hear a giant monotony walking around inside of it. There’s a cure for that as well. But it must be collected from the Renaissance in parcels of air. These drugs will reveal the quantum amphibians in your eyes. Little legs of meaning carry me forward. If you look closely at a Viking ship you will immediately notice the magnitude of grace in the sweep of its lines. This might be used as an example of thought. The brain is a typhoon crashing through the void. It’s all in your mind, people say. But what if the mind is a ball, & language is at bat?

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world, said Wittgenstein. I speak the language of goats. Death is at the bottom of everything. Cabbage, moss, carpentry, water polo. I open my eyes & see molecular blizzards, long roads among the hum of neurons. There’s nothing to believe in. And so there is darkness. And thunder. And the picture gets murky. Anything out there could be talking your language. It could be pain, an introspection, or a little fire in the stove. Creating anything is talking. Philosophy is being a dog in the desert with a billion stars all around. And the pulleys creak as we draw the sky closer. 

The Politics Of The Soul

Am I sentimental? Can’t say. What is it to be sentimental? It’s all a haze, I’m a guest here, a listless straw bending out of a glass of root beer, the trill of oblivion bouncing on my brain. The stencil is a novelty. My revulsions are inscrutable. But not always. Sometimes the highway is a hypotenuse and my turbidity has a value that only the night can reveal. That’s Vegas ahead. The play of lights is a good indication of a geometry inverted to shine brighter than a joker masticating a slug of macaroni. You can’t duplicate the dust of an ancient library. Just take a volume down & open it. It says that the lechery of any given moment is an endowment pranked to impress the gullible. I’m putting all my money on Foment. Gray is a vernacular of color you don’t often find here. But value it for what it is. Value it for its blind spots & vagueness. Gray is forgiving. Mournful. But redemptive. Intrinsic to the politics of the soul. 

There’s a princess sitting on a toadstool, spreading her ledgers out for all to see. Planet Earth is essentially a tabernacle where these things happen. Things like vagrancy & quartz, jelly & remonstration. Janis Joplin. Etta James. Nina Simone. Delicacies leap from subtlety to outright inundation. We could all use some fireworks occasionally. Editorials that remember what it was like to drive through Iowa protesting the results of a caucus. We’re all involved with the universe. How can you not be? Lives are illegible until the harmonics of our language find their radar & the mechanic finds a cracked head gasket. I don’t expect any answers. But I could do with a towel.

It’s amazing what transformations take place, what apocalypses occur when enough is not enough & the variables curtsy to questionnaires posed by billionaires. I’ve seen reciprocity turn to atrocity, verbosity trend toward monstrosity. This is what happens in a universe of flux. An aggressively friendly realtor staggers through a door of flippers & bells prattling of faucets & bathtub tile. This does little to promote calm & balance. Even the squids wear spurs. And when, for the first time, you see a tentacle reach for a bottle of whiskey high on a shelf in a San Antonio bar you wonder if it’s fair to berate yourself for being so insecure. And sip another apocalypse.

It’s always a bit strange when you see a waterfall of hair & aren’t sure whether it belongs to a woman or a horse. Perception is rarely a neutral registration. Most of the time it’s a dilation, an elation creating sparks & havoc. The news of the day propelled by unicorn. The world wobbles. I warp into nouns. I jingle them like thumbs. Each claw must open a door to let the monster out. I do this in my spare time. This is how elbows happen. It’s athletic to appreciate vineyards. Grapes bring us perceptions of another world. This is by now apparent. The hammer is defined by nails as music is awakened by piano. And this generates the words I’m using to peruse your eyes.

It’s why I do this. It’s why I do anything. Hysterectomies & liposuctions are just the manifestations of a trademark mortality brought to us by life, which is a form of existence, which is a form of grizzly, a big furry raging appetite high in the mountains of an imaginary realm I’ve just now squeezed into this sentence, which is just now reaching a conclusion, though maybe not here, it’s rolling up & down the neck of a guitar in a parallel universe bristling with unimaginable possibilities, the kind of thing that happens to you in a state of mesmerized abandonment, or C minor on a slide guitar. 

The Fruit Of Subversive Ghosts

I’m not sure what to make of the new flavor. Its vapory essence eludes the chiseling of words, the hammer of grammar, the gloss of definition, perspicuity packed and waxed in syntax. We share such phenomena constantly, somehow, feeling empowered by the concretizing illusions of language, but ultimately chastened by its delusional allure. Below, the slosh of waves is fat with tugs. Everyone is swimming upstream, immersed in argument, the senses heated to horsepower, arms reaching from the water urgent, hot, and phantasmal. My ape is within, stunned by sleep. I’m green. I’m a bistro to my own flutter. Mint condition paraffin causes the ooze of delivery to illumine the cartilage footnoting our bones. Later, when the sun justifies our windows, we find life in our theorems, however misconceived or snapped together like Lego blocks.

I like this rake. I can use it in order to better understand the obscurity that surrounds our drama. The point is well taken. But I remain opposed to crime. I prefer cream. The olive oil glistening on that roasted chicken makes me feel a little mercantile. Is that natural? A storm of decadence inhabits the corner of my mouth, smoldering like a word that I almost uttered, animated with breath and blood and warm intention. I guard nothing as much as furniture. I see mud and forsythia. I see rhinoceros and energy. I think that the universe is made of ink and apricot. Even the fox must flee the mad affirmations of the hippopotamus.

Ok, so then it gets, you know, nothing done, and that’s sophisticated, you know, like opening a door and holding it for an old woman to squeeze through with her groceries, or Ricky Gervais. The map, so they say, is not the territory. And yet my left pocket is a realm unto itself, a monad, if you will, of car keys and loose change, I feel summer in there, the warmth of my leg warming the cold metal keys, pennies and nickels and dimes, quarters, the extent of my symbolic life, which is contact, touch, and sobbing about those things that can never return, they’re bombs in the memory now, illumining the skull with their explosive opium.

I’m a man, whatever that means, it’s a stage toward something exciting, marmalade or maturity, take your pick. The numbers are pastel. They allow us to calculate our trajectory with greater subtlety and flocks of impenitent rust. I see a beautiful wheel. It smells of almonds and travel. These agitations that I continue to plague me at night are legible as courtrooms or bottomless pits. The house creaks like a ship underway in a latitude of trespass and trepidation. It helps to have heat. It awakens the animal in me and enlarges all the patterns. Sooner or later we all become an amalgamation, a sponge, a spherical blob of glistening convolution. Squeeze a brain and words come dribbling out of it. Mop a sentence with the brain and the moisture is vaporized into thought, sublimated into fantasy, steeped in grammar, which is the language of water, which is the anguish of language.

And so the propellers are propositions. How can it be otherwise? Each word has a firm crust and a juicy interior, the etymology a pilgrimage through the corridors of history, people conversing in the streets. Hobnob, shake hands, nod in agreement, emit signs of interior life, moods and opinions. Those inclinations in us that cause perception to meander, enter new dimensions. The prospects are gorgeous. Divinity resides in our hands. Mud combined with thought amounts to bricks, exhibits, the peppermint of kings, and the fruit of subversive ghosts. 

Ninety-Two Pounds Of Air

The steam is emotive, effectively vague and good for the mushrooms. I need mushrooms. They’re masterpieces of decay. Thought whistles out of the kettle creating histories of grandeur and iron. Today we begin a new fauna. These shaggy words will bring forth a delirium of coral and cause moods to float through the sentence like dugout canoes with no one in them. At least, that’s the current ambition. Things might change when the prisoners are released and we all have knitting to finish.

Alchemy is, after all, a blue enterprise. It’s not the kind of work anyone can do under fluorescent lighting. The endurance of being is a conversation with death. Always. It’s always been this way. I praise the virtue of aberration. I rip definitions into luxurious indiscretions and multicolored extension cords. I lean against the peninsula of a treble clef and drag the sky over my brain. It feels silk, like the first day I went fishing for a princess in the lobby aquarium. I was not a little hermetic then, and not a little hermetic now, but I still like hunting down reactions to my upheaval. It’s a form of therapy. Like hanging upside down in the closet.

Twilight tastes of sawdust and sausage, the shiver of liberation. Anguish bathed in apology. The clouds must be studied. The guitar must be played. The words must be pronounced. With a harmonica and a tender zucchini. Our destiny is not in the stars. It’s in a martini.

Everything crumbles, this is the reality of life. Even the king must undergo the rigors of mortality, shoulders stooped, muscles aching, bones creaking. However, the sun always rises. There’s a world in each word. There’s the energy of a sun streaming out of our eyes when we engage with words, engage with their sounds, their shadows and vetoes, their tufts and tails of cosmic undulation. The taste of beauty can be bitter, but the soul of the lute is succinct in its string and vibration.

The painter sits in front of the canvas pondering a goat. The purpose of a tool isn’t always apparent. It’s why the trees are so radical. The leaves are pages of a book browsed by the wind. Everything reaches for the sun. For the light. For the heat. For the source of all this sensation.

I like the fog when I can wear it like a shirt, or a debutant at the Ball of Anarchic Banana Jitters. I feel the shiver of consonants in the music of an emerald. The filet is almost ready. It smells like a season ticket to a roller-skating derby. It’s not a normal filet. It’s more like a perspiration of pretense. As you can see, nudity goes a long way here. My sole regret was to spank the meringue before the raven found his timbre. The silence that ensued was deeper than a preposition tromping around in the sentence with an ax.

Something is dripping from my life. It might be me, it might be my life, and it might be buffalo. How bucolic, you say, and I agree. The paroxysms are unmistakable. I've given birth to a herring. Or did I mean hearing? My hearing is here. Where my heart is. Caged in ninety-two pounds of air. Empty. Vacant. But joined by symbols in a usury of emotion. Picture the skeleton of a whale on a sandy beach. That’s it. The dream is gone. But the bones remain. And the angels all weep in the rain.

Savage Mood

A parabola is the trajectory a projectile follows that gravity feeds as gravity feeds everything in space with its ferocious magnetism and repulsive force depending on where you are how situated you are in relation to everything else and that’s a parabola. Parabola the parable of the bowl. Parabola the bowl of parakeets in a parakeet cage lined with newspaper which is lined with the distortions and tragedies of its day.

And what’s the feeling of the hand with a fork in it? The tines are signs of penetration in the glory of a moment too quiet to be fully understood. It’s the secrets in wax that glow in the flame dancing at the tip. That illumine a room illumine a skull illumines the darkness so brightly the darkness grows plump and palpable in that strange new heat arousing the muscle beating the heart the heart making it beat beat beat.

I feel increasingly alien, lost, detached and reattached simultaneously. I feel I belong to something ancient that’s no longer in evidence, that’s been crushed by commodity, industry, that ugly word, industry, yuk, I get antagonized immediately as soon as I hear both those words: industry and commodity. I like things, I like food, I like having money, I like being able to procure items when I want them, whether I need them to sustain comfort and life, or if I just want to indulge in some luxury. But these desires are also burdensome. Confining. Driving. Beguiling. What desire was ever liberating?

When I hear the word ‘industry’ I hear the clank of chains, I hear the rhythms and deadening syntax of monotony, of the extraction of resources and giant holes in the ground, the stink of diesel, the stench of exhaustion, the obliviousness to anything sublime and beautiful. Acerbity rises in me, my blood turns caustic, acidic. I want to escape all this, as I want to destroy it, alter it, turn it back to renewal and interaction with the cosmos and its billions of stars and black energies of light.

You really can’t exaggerate anything these days, that’s how bad they’ve gotten. 7,000 people quarantined on a cruise ship outside Civitavecchia, Italy. The coronavirus is freaking everyone out. A woman of Chinese nationality came down with the flu. The passengers and crew waited for the results of tests carried out by a medical team from Rome’s Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases. And the woman just had a normal case of flu not the dreaded coronavirus, which are enveloped viruses with a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry that have an incubation period from two to fourteen days. Its name comes Latin corona, meaning crown or halo, which refers to the fringe of the virions (virus particles), which resemble a royal crown or solar corona. If you’re going to come down the flu it might as well be something imperial. Lethal, but regal.

But what I find gross is the ginormous cruise ship – the Costa Smeralda – with its 2,641 staterooms, suites and cabins. What’s a ship that big doing on a poor old ocean dying of asphyxiation from too much carbon dioxide and plastic? Don’t have people something better to do than float around stuffing their pieholes with food and booze on a colossal shopping mall at sea? The world is round but the people on it are obtuse rectal rhombi with supplementary angles and diarrhetic hemorrhoids. Completely disconnected. No sense of reality at all. But good at reproduction. I’ll give them that. They know to fuck and pop babies out. And this results in great appetites and lunatic ambitions. The people want more and more and more from a finite ball in space. It isn’t huge, it isn’t small. It’s just a pretty ball of swans and lakes and waterfalls and trees. Pimentos and hickory and bees. Emeralds and eggs and photoelectric emissons. But it can take only so much before it collapses and its yachts and apricots begin to decompose and rot.

I blow on my fingers and wait for the sun to rise in the east. I hear the groan and rattle of a garbage truck. The chirp of robins. What happened to my life, I wonder, where did it all go?

And isn’t earth the ultimate cruise ship?

I need a new alchemy. I need a new way to break the filigree of overwrought thought into vapory ringlets of nebular oblivion. I need the alchemy of experience and the alchemy of trinkets. The alchemy of words and the alchemy of herbs. The alchemy of ancient wizards in old cold craggy castles. The wind raging. The crows cawing. The eerie colors of chemicals, red and green and pink bubbling in glass beakers. The hiss and sizzle of molten metals. The aura of the otherworldly surrounding anything that might catch a little light. And outside the stars send their light shooting across millions of light years of cold dark space. Places where space melts and known laws disappear. We were here, they say, we were here.