Take A Word Like Puff

A young blonde woman drives a white Mustang down a desert highway. Can you picture that? Yes? There’s a word for that ability: imagination. You deserve a pat on the back. Imagining things is a source of power. It can also get a little dangerous. Imagine a dragon. Easy, yes? Sure it is. But let’s go further. Let’s say the dragon is you. You’re the dragon. You’ve got scales. You’ve got wings. You’ve got sharp teeth. You can breathe fire. What’s that like? How does it feel? It feels exhilarating. But also, when the initial feeling wears off, a little disappointing. And foolish. Because it’s not real. And we live in a culture that values pragmatism above all things else. Because pragmatism – the practical, the useful, the purposeful, the commonsensical – is a direct route to money. Which is ironic. Because money is a product of the imagination. Think about it. How is it possible that those numbers in your bank account can so easily be converted to things you want: a house, a car, fine clothes, fine food, jewelry and wine, a big swimming pool, drugs, thrills, exclusivity. Money is a symbol. Like language. Like words. Like sounds that carry meaning, significance, geography, adventure. Names, news, moods.

Imagination feeds on uncertainty. It’s the product of inquiry and speculation. Wonder. This is why dictatorial regimes are uncomfortable with imaginative energies and do everything they can to suppress it. Maintaining power requires ignorance and compliance. If a power can undermine or deaden the imagination the population is easy to propagandize and marshal its compliance to achieve greater levels of power. The one thing that the powerful want is more power. Imagination undermines power. Imagination must be suppressed. But it won’t. Can’t. Cannot be suppressed. It fires up out of embers thought dead. That glimmer in the ash is a word on the verge of fire. Whose flames dance walls of stone in the skull of a mountain. Where the images flicker in prologue to the stealth of an ocelot. And the ground is splayed with a ring of bone.

Money is also a dominant force and can be used to control the zeitgeist, the popular sentiments of a population, and ascribe vertiginous amounts of value to one artist or set of artists and exclude others. Corporate collections can include some tremendously great art which, at one time, was subversive and edgy, but once it was anointed great art by the financial sector its subversive tendencies became irrelevant and tame. It went from being an art of power and imagination to being an auctionable item at Sotheby’s. This is how an oil painting becomes the equivalent of an oil derrick. Art is a celebration of wildness. Finance is a calibration of value.

Poetry, unlike music and visual art, is impossible to convert to capital and financial investment. This is because, as Hegel pointed out, “poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.” It also requires its audience – what little audience it is able to convene – to participate in its production. We all know what creative writing is, but how many people talk about creative reading?

Readers, at least in the United States, have been rendered extinct by electronic media. Anyone who has gone for a walk recently has noticed the alarming number of zombies walking while holding and staring fixedly at an electronic gadget in their hands. “The ultimate famine,” wrote Diane Di Prima, “is the starvation / of the imagination // it is death to be sure, but the undead / seek to inhabit someone else’s world.”

Get out there. Engage. Cries the imagination.

Take a word like ‘puff’ and let the imagination run with it. That which puffs has proof of puffing in the pudding of the puff. Language and imagination are made for each other. No language without imagination. No imagination without language.

Is that true? Does imagination need language to exist? Who can say? It takes a few words to launch this phenomenon. It helps to be extracurricular. The rock is a rock with or without words. When we say ‘passage’ do we mean a way of exit or entrance, a road, path, channel or course by which something passes, or do we mean a corridor or lobby giving access to the different rooms or parts of a building? Do we mean the action or process of passing from one place, condition, or stage to another, or do we mean the continuous movement or flow of a river, say the Ohio? Do we mean something that happens or is done or do we mean a fog horn blowing as we find passage aboard the Boaty McBoatface? I think I mean a brief passage in the air through an aria.

It's all about context. From Latin contextus, a joining together. Originally, past participle of contexere, “to weave together.” This could be linen. This could be lace. This could be imagining combinations and this could be the voices of singers mingling together. This could be linsey-woolsey. This could be fuzzy wuzzy. This could be what you want it to be. What do you want it to be? You can say it and have it if you say it. But you’ve got to say it. Say it. Before it says you.

But that’s ok, too. Ok to let it out. Ok to be a channel for mysterious and invisible energies. Open the mouth. Make words. Make words create something. Convert to matter an idea with breath. With the assistance of air. What is it? What have you got there? Is that a twinkle in your eye, or the star of Bethlehem? Here comes a train. It’s a train of the imagination. It runs on coal. But the coal must be imagined. The train must be imagined. Here comes the train. Here comes the imagination flying to heaven to get the latest news. And roll and roll and roll and roll.

On Censorship

The egregious censorship occurring on the internet now is suffocating, of grievous harm to public thought and discourse, and just plain stupid. It betrays a deep insecurity among the corporate giants, media conglomerates and military-industrial-complex. They want to hold on to their power. This is plainly evident. They also want to control the narrative legitimizing their actions, however manifestly heinous and destructive they may be. And to a large and very disturbing extent the public is complicit in their authoritarian control. They like it. They feel secure. The paternalistic control over their opinions and individual agency is a welcome tyranny. It removes them from responsibility. There are many people whose happiest years were the time served in the military. Decisions were made for them. They were liberated from the burden of personal agency. Consequently, narratives maintained by the corporate media propagandizing and legitimating acts of atrocity, even to the point of making these atrocities appear heroic, go down the gullets of the subservient public as smoothly and sweetly as ice cream.

Nobody likes to think. Thinking is hard. Thinking interrupts the pleasurable fantasies pumping dopamine and joy from the galaxies of neurons in one’s brain and the fun and frolic of weaving happy illusions about one’s status and place in the world and replaces it with a defiant vulnerability and earnest inquiry. With demurral and doubt. With analysis and curiosity. It allows for tolerance, permission to entertain opposing views, assent to dissent, consent to entertain an opinion that threatens one’s ideological structure. Thinking can be a painful process. I don’t particularly enjoy it, it can lead to a pained awareness of one’s dilemma as a human being or a shaky disassembly of one’s assumptions, but if I don’t allow it, if I thrust up defenses and distract it with fantasies and games and celebrity gossip I feel diminished, my existence begins to feel stale. I need opposition to strengthen the feeling of being alive. When I’m deprived of information and ideas I wither. I shrink. I become infantile. I become stupid.

John Stewart Mills had some interesting views on the subject. An ardent defender of religious tolerance against those who arrogate "infallibility," defined as "the fact of wanting to decide for others without allowing them to hear what may be said on the other side," Mill formulates a criticism of an astonishing breadth of censorship. He warns us of the risk of intellectual anesthesia produced by the internalization by each of what she or he or they feels authorized to think or say. We police ourselves. “Our merely social intolerance kills no one,” Mill wrote, “roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion…but the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind…while that which would strengthen and enlarge men’s minds, free and daring speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned.”

Especially vulnerable are those employed in academia. The universities have deferred to the Woke idealogues and cancel culture and other like-minded puritanical despots and shut down what used to be - and needs to be - a robust environment of intellectual daring and bold and searching polemic. Simultaneously, the social media platforms have paternalistically and arbitrarily assumed the right to decide who and what to bar from social discussion. And the mainstream media conglomerates spew outright lies about current events in an effort to support the overarching power structure.

Mill proposed eccentricity as an antidote to the insidious policing of thought and opinion. “In this age,” he wrote, “the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

 

Start The Sugar

Ooze keeps Thursday to itself. This is a problem. I have a mound to build, treasures of Anglo-Saxon anxiety to bury in repose. Shivering swarms of frankness flame from my embalming machine. I preserve carrot clouds in the right pocket of my vegetable pants. Admonition demonstrates lungs. Therefore, the tiger walks through the forest, but the power to stew remains plugged into my martini.

What is logic? I will tell you: it happens during the season of carpenters, when they have their visions, and pound nails into the air. Great cathedrals are built from this strength. Cathedrals of air. Vertiginous. Buoyant with faith. And tax exemption. Dumplings ripple through their own reality under a gravy of backwater shade. It’s expensive to step into ourselves, and easier to slip away, so what we do is leave our ashes behind and move forward drinking panaceas from old canteens. The forest is both spongy and flannel. Better to pet the scorpion than herald the dirt.

I don’t really like those big bloated heavy metal songs. But I do like Gothic chocolate. I like the vertebral breath of sumptuous beings and the chins of beautiful conversations. I have furnished this sentence with words. They will seek the meaning I’m trying to capture while I drink my coffee with a jeweled fork and wonder why it takes so long to arrive at transcendence, a little town to the south of wishbone.

I’ve been thinking about dead people a lot lately. Not sure why. Probably because so many people have died lately. Where’d they go? The eternal question. With an eternal answer. Whatever that answer happens to be. I like sugar and silence. Will there be sugar and silence in oblivion? There will be silence. I’m not so sure about sugar. Sugar is never sure. There is no sureness in sugar. Sugar is sugar and salt is salt. There is certainty in pepper but there is neither quartz or calcite in calculus. What do ghosts eat? Ghosts eat ectoplasmic hamburgers. Next to the ghosts of the quadrupeds who provided the meat for the hamburger. But were unwilling participants. And so are now ghosts on the prairie of heaven. Forever. Chewing & ruminating.

Twist a snowman stick. It will correct you. It will quench you. It will cheer you. It will unzip you, your lush suck shaking with ecstasy. Dear World Beauty: you have such fine evening teeth. I offer you this granulated ear screen I found at Home Depot in the fantasy aisle. It protects you from illocutionary faux pas.

I slide through glory looking for the balm of grammar, the hungry mixed kind, submersible and sumac. Start the sugar. I want to rummage a think until it talks like thought. There’s a hot gallant wax for molding such things, the contour of thought, which is shapeless as it is residual, going places I can’t go, saying things I can’t say, filling the air with jewelry, jazz and illumination. Bramble on the borders. Sopranos in the halls. Candles in the corners. Shadows on the walls.

Gently The Worm Runs

Lung weariness dwells in knock knock pay. Gently the worm runs. It exceeds the emotional pillow. The sneaker leg drink walks on Gothic yellow soap. And what this does is dazzling, a northern flu of unbalanced cans.

Yes. The world is falling apart.

Maestro mashes the toot. This is how the true ranges the kinship of countenance. Look into those eyes and see how the magnet of guilt draws verbosity.

Rock crime by a chameleon patella. Sound is a poetry rag. I’m undecided trimming sugar. Hornet storm around the lampshade. Stones engulfed by a swimming pool.

Give me liberty or give me a bean. I will wish for a stalk of black-eyed peas. I crumple away by election. The pomegranate melee made sweating a priority, and we did, we sweated until the stationary arrived and calm prevailed in the greenhouse. The day organ used a rechargeable harness, so we could hop around on a single syllable. And then a chasm of mimosa music reached our ears by nominative fingers, and we could see the carpenter holding his knife.

Have a drink of molecular dwarf quintessence. Sultry letters were scratched on the sumptuous package.  They meant nothing but fire. I’m a career clock when the day closes. My night shirts produce sparks. I’m the rugged fly king. I drink a map of Norway in a storm of camel fat. That’s a nice bronze move you made. Can I have it? I’ll give you anything. Except my harpsichord. I’ll take a sullen misty shot at your salt and see what you think about gladiolas. We all need good moist dirt. And a poem made of quilted falcon offers.

America was wrong about ethanol. And so we went our way. Music hangs by a string. It made me effulgent and convoluted but I acquired a knot to sell. The truest music arrives in a red cloud of lightning and torment and shoots pellets of drunken thought at the night for fun. The night falls dead on a bed of blue air and rises with the dawn, a headache, a yawn, and yesterday’s clothes. Resurrected. And humped like a revision.

Dirty cave cry. Pineapple become bliss. Burning stomach plumbing. Stunned subtle ash. Thoughtless sinking knowledge. These are the moments in life’s drama when one dares a neon swan to jump into a swarm of language and discover a Danish hotel. Whispers of absence. Land twinkling with consciousness. A drawer full of lungs. And the frail grace of a gallant almond.

Eschatological Llama

Think of language as a hyperobject, this thing, this energy that moves through us, creating our moods and thoughts, putting us all in a trance of eschatological llama, a people of mountains and sun, the sweat of rocks, the frost of duty, the glaze of negation, the blaze of affirmation. Machu Pichu. Old Mountain. Language is contradictions. Because they’re unzipped on a plate of opera. Quest along a coast moving through space creating nostrils. A little popcorn goes a long way. Even if our experience of actual conversations, of dialogue in Pinter’s plays, and of the dead metaphors that talk of argument in terms of war, doesn’t tally with our dalliance in monarchy, the luxuries of power, questions raised during squabbles, quirks of behavior, and everything else too nebulous to articulate, too thick to think, too pale to say. It’s all more than mere sensation. Because as soon as a language gets hold of it it no longer belongs to us. It belongs to simulation. And skillets and railroads and lacrosse. Dragons belching fire. Grosbeak in a ponderosa pine. There is this to say about grooves. They once gave us voices and music. Now they give us graves. Grave are the grooves that gravity grooms with her gravel. Everything has its tag and temper. Everything dipped in language has an ulterior spirit, an energy that can’t be captured in German or French, Urdu or Zulu. This is understandable. This is a violent world. There have to be things – beings, spirits, auras, halos, paracletes, parakeets, divine messengers, treasures not of this world. But why say “have to be.” Does anything have to be? This is language asserting itself again. Language insists it has dimensions available to us if we’re willing to be inventive enough. The most inventive writer soon finds a gimmick and finds it fun and worthwhile to expand on its antinomian generosity. The truth appears clear and cold as glass on a barrel of rain and then one day a knock comes to the door and she must answer a summons. And that call is nothing anyone ever predicts. Call it the call of the wild. Call it illocutionary. But Jesus. Get up & open the door.

 

Let's Talk About Bones

Let’s talk about bones and ghosts and psychopaths. Slurred words of hysterical henna. I feel incessant as a revulsion. The humidity has blurred my glasses. But not my thinking. That’s still walking out there to squeeze something, an idea or a sunflower awakening the sun. Bed always feels wonderful. The molasses one day wanted to be a stone and so moved very slow. I see a fierce blaze in your eyes as you read this. Blood walks around in a bag of skin insisting on incense and I say go, tell it on the nails and gape at the ruins of humanity. The first thing I remember was a colossal flash. And I saw a flea follow its destiny. So go, go slowly in a hurry. Go damp and humble as a kitchen rag. Contour is the art of shape. I’ve just escaped from a bikini colony. Last night I dreamed of farms and roadside attractions and went into a bar to have some fun and marveled at my fingers and how handy they were especially when opposed by a thumb. I like the ferocity of mint. This city is rotten to the core. Whose idea of Peru is emotional as an underworld? Whenever I see a box open I run for cover. Hope was the one demon that didn’t make it out of Pandora’s box. This is why to this day apples dwell in trees and when a mouth pushes a sentence out it hurts the proverb, the one about marks on the wall and the ocean of longing chained to my heart. All our hearts. The overall situation is oval. It won’t hurt to sip what can be gulped or to gulp what can be sipped. The snow is falling on a man with a weak pulse. And just yesterday it was raining knives and machinery. How do you insinuate a protest? You remind me of a map. Crows lift themselves into flight and I got a job chewing Ritz crackers. I’m glad to meet you please please me and surrender to the gasoline of yourself. Convulse like chaos. There you go. It’s hard to get to know people in a dance club. I’m taking myself outside if it's visceral enough. I see a vividness I’ve never seen before trickling through the subtext. The sails are filing with wind and the words are filling with meaning and the beards are held together by copper wire. I’ve got an appetite for space. Dignity is a social invention, like strangers on a train, or time enclosed in a book on a plane for banished lovers. We must evacuate this gauze one day and go for a length of tinfoil. I serve a sanguine purpose. My arm clangs like an alarm clock. My engine starts and I let it idle. It’s a process. I’m as perplexed as you with human consciousness. My chest is full of infinity. Ever feel like that? Like rain in California. Welts all over the prophecy. To befriend is to be friendly. Shirring means to gather. Blisters mean nothing they can’t concede to the whisper of cypress in the bayou, or the gater dreaming meat.

I Slap The Air

I slap the air for the love of Mike who’s Mike I don’t know I just live here. He who stands drenched in corruption must also be susceptible to certain types of medication. Me, I’m out on the range. All I care about is geology. Could you hand me that rock? The next sound you hear will be one of abandon. This is how a poem begins. It corresponds to the ocean. And then gets on my glasses. I feel like a rudder in a stew of cinnamon and freeze-dried ideas. This is that greeting whose content baffles the embrace of its prose. A song, on the other hand, begins with a breath. And is carried by melody to a place of healing. For the tongue is a mighty organ. I like to stand in the sunlight and throw myself into it. And when I’m shattering world records I like to talk to the grass. Each blade has something to say on Hustle-Bustle Avenue. I went outside with a big voice and came back with a bank. We think we are forests. But we are sleeves. I’m in expectation of a stick to help fulfill the goal of this costume. One day I will venerate a horse and wear a hat of mice riding bicycles. But this is not about thrashing around in bed. This is about a coup d’état that happened one day on my coffee table. And if you’re out on the highway keep an eye out for black ice. The fog does nothing to help. Not even symbolically. I feel many tired feelings leaning against my rib. And here I am scraping a soup ladle in Sligo. It’s at the heart of my operation. As you can see, I’m wearing a white tie over a black shirt. It would take years to sleep enough to forget this world. I’ve got sleet and ice in my eyebrows. Believe me. I’m not the sort of person who twinkles. I’m the guy who broods alone in a booth with a pint of Guinness in front of him. You, me, all of us, our brains are stuck to a big idea. I once saw a tulip emerge from an opened mouth and lie down on a sheet of sobbing tears of horticulture. All hands on deck. A philosophy just arrived. Defeat is sometimes sweet. But what can be sweeter than serapes and bells? The needles of stern catharsis all ask the same question: what is greed exactly? Then they curl into answers. And a mule named Bill. Here we are. At last. Sewing the air together with words. But are you required to jerk forward like that? We have all stopped at one time or another to measure a gargoyle fart. The next time I see you I will be king. But king of what? Our play is over. The curtain is coming down. You should tell your story to someone backstage. My radio has magical dials. New cars are overly complex, but the lips can still hammer on a sentence now and then and even though the nails are bent and crooked we have ears like gearshifts and nets for catching drugstores. I’m as awed as I am surprised. My leg stiffens just thinking about it. How sadness has killed the novelty of itself but remains an important source of fire. Nobody ever decides to be inspired they just are. I’m resigned to the facts of life. Think of me as a single fish in a bowl of house with a junkyard out back and a calliope in my mouth. I’ve got an umbrella for the underworld and a pearly contraption for milking the sky. Go ahead. Walk in and sit down. The barley is for Charlie and the Harley is for Snarly. Have a chip. Our riots are about to begin.