When The Wood Dries

There’s a private shine in my hammer. My indicative gaze cannot be explained by crawling. Our kitchen is full of mushrooms and pans. Some of the them are quite beautiful. They all shine. They all come into the foreground when the heat is on. I have, therefore, expanded my journey to include a lip or two. A tongue. An appetite for adventure. Mosquitos swarm around the pump. I compile shadows in order to describe the anatomy of the sky. I hope that the wine is good. We all have shadows. It’s why we’ve painted the rattles red and created a door for the crustaceans to come and go at their pleasure. Life enhances its roots by flowering into vines and blackberries. Entanglements. Thorns. But the true treasures are in the appendix of the guidebook. This is where we find trails that have barely been used. They lead to grottos and the touch of moonlight. It was never my intention to pilot a brush through your hair. Each time I hear the flap of a flag I grab a shovel and start to dig. It’s elementary to flex one’s muscles. I do what I can. You do what you’re good at. I’ve evolved mountain streams to startle the wandering gaze of grocery checkers. No one expects a wet arm to punch the air into parenthetical pathos. The coupons reflect the density of autumn. Everything happens among words. I try to create a way to enter another dimension. A new perspective. Let’s call it that. Embryonic sensations find full maturity in the drama of comparison. And sometimes they find expression in music. I suggest that the metamorphosis of insects fluctuates between the ability to swim and the opacity of bluebells. I brush my hair with a crow. It’s always respectable to find someone meditating. Emotions crash through my ribs seeking ecstasy. My eyes wander around a spoon. I fall to the ground and adapt to the eccentricities of my zipper later. The catalogue omits the secrets of mink, and for good reason: the rags of morning offer the wisdom of shoes. I grabbed the lotus and ran. The mailbox gravy was in bas-relief, but the meanings inherent in the nimbleness of the tongue argued for more space and less gravity. Specifically, chisels. We’ll get to them later, when the wood dries. 

Scrambled Eggs

This is the peculiarity of scrambled eggs, that once scrambled eggs have become a habit of mind, this habit of mind converts everything that comes within its purview into the language of scrambled eggs. The territory of the scrambled is unlimited. The potential for scrambling is endless, each group of natural phenomena, each phase of social life, each stage of development past or present is matter for scrambling. Order and symmetry have their place, but too much order and symmetry deaden. They must be counteracted. They must be subject to scrambling. Without scrambling, there can be no eggs. Without eggs, there can be no scrambling of eggs. But there will be scrambling. Scrambling will occur. Scrambling cannot be restrained. Everyone strives to be scrambled. Scrambled in all the colors of distress, ecstasy, rapture, mortality, seminars, station wagons and office supplies. The essence of all scrambling is located in its method, not in its material. Sometimes shortcuts to scrambling may be found in books. Or amusement park rides. Bank robbers making breakfast. Jackson Pollock in a dance around a canvas making energy visible. The individual who sees relations in all things is a born scrambler. The facts may belong to the social statistics of our cities, to the atmospheres of the most distant planets, to the digestive organs of worms and cephalopods, to the quantum mechanics of the subatomic domain, but until they’re scrambled, the facts are inert. The facts are dull and without life. It is not the facts themselves that form cognition, but the tumult in which they ignite.

The Realm Of Fugitives

Writing is the realm of fugitives. If you don’t like reality, you can write a new one. All you need is a few words. You do the work of a mason: you assemble the words one by one, you slather on some mortar and voila! a freshly constructed reality.

Will it be an actual reality? No. Reality, at least the parts of it we can see and smell and hear and touch, is not made of words. It’s made of actual bricks and actual mortar not the words brick and mortar. It’s made of hydrogen and water and iron and clay. Molecules. Atoms. Subatomic particles. Chamomile and cement. Ginger root and rocks. Pittsburgh and breasts.

I recommend chalk. You can go much further with chalk. You can do equations. Equations are where it's at. Equations tremble with abstraction. Equations of power. Equations of mass and density. Torque, rotation, angular momentum. These all help describe the smell and activities of a hardware store.

The virtually soundless circulation of blood. The absurdly ordinary assurance of parachute receipts. The strangely unreadable expression of people's faces when they are in grocery stores.

 Is there a physics for this? Of faces lost in reverie? People enraptured by a smartphone?

This is where words and equations fail. Everything is conjecture. Everything is a blip on the radar of the heart. Just be sure to place a separator on the conveyor belt. Try to be friendly. Move with the stealth of a moose in a hastily drawn cartoon. Use your words carefully. But remember: they’re just words. If you drop them, they won’t break. You can drain a word of meaning by lying and equivocation, but you can’t break it. They’re made of air and sound. They have the power to heal. They have the power to injure. But they can’t duplicate a banana unless you inflate them with ontological uncanniness and step back and watch them explode into giant fireballs of semantic instability.  

If this happens, apologize. Construct another sentence. See if you can create a paradigm that can be shared with your neighbors. Or just say fuck it and write poetry. Put your words into the developing fluid of extreme speculation. The image will slowly appear. It won’t be my image. It will be your image. It will be the image of a compass. Or a chair.

Add some invectives. Cultivate refusal. Spit. Chew your food. Grow a library big as Belgium. 

Distortions Mutations Limps

The wind has something to teach me about me. It helps me to understand oil. Dry kite radar. I get dressed in distress like a tale about poultry. Sinking knots embalmed in paint. Abstract expressionist sneezes carried into quicker echoes of awkward materialism.

And why? Why are burdens necessary?

Why is pain necessary?

Sullen chestnut rowing. Undecided flair swarming with plumage. Metal theatre. I eat to live in exultation of a field of wheat. And this confirms the prickles of dance I sometimes feel in the halls of photography.

The captain’s sad sumptuous gear is a testament to exile.

Arizona walks by carrying its canyons in a basket of reverie. It has the weight of snow on a night of silhouettes and legends. Inflated oceans big as hope and just as visceral as food. I see a set of teeth pass against a storm and reflect on the burlesque of circumference. Pendulum glasses for the diving board. Vagaries for our physics.

Did I hear Raymond Roussel enter the room?

It is the drama of the bear in the bell tower. The texture of a noble idea. The weight of the unknown in a whisper of ice. A flood of hard glass in a skein of toes.

Why does the universe exist?

Gothic angels lend us the crime of desire. Hot sapphire the warm flexibility of wax.

The heating of the grotto wheel is trees ahead of autumn. It opens to the ash of nothing and then stuns the sediment with a career of snow.

Heaven is a knowledge we undertake later in life. Early in life, heaven is everywhere. Later in life, heaven is an animal blinking confusedly in a mailbox. It’s a warm coat in a winter storm.

I approve of the funny weariness I’ve become. The herd makes its way toward the shore in the light of the coffeehouse. A shaman enters the cave. Heat moves the ebony wheels of a fierce consonant. The consonant squeezes a vowel and a bear lumbers by. A rattle calls for resilience. Texture assumes the dimensions of sight. This is natural. We have built indulgences based on nothing but stucco.

We’re not empty. Not at all. We’re just gliding. It began with a radio and ended with a gamble. The spectrum widened, and we went in. Even the sidewalk held still. Nothing is so impersonal that it doesn’t require nipples at some point. Embrace it. Embrace the ambiguities. They need our certainty. Our expansive definitions. Which are cast to the wind. And return to the hermitage heaving with charming syncopations.

Distortions. Mutations. Limps.

The buttermilk is wearing alpine. We elect more shadows to cast on the wall. It doesn’t help much. I move the oysters in my notebook. The king rides by on a horse made of lightning. This is what writing is, what it’s been along. A compensation for my lack of math, certainly, but also a fence in the fog claiming to contain what it doesn’t understand. 

An Agate Searched By Rain

Wave gently calculated by abstraction. By distraction. Frolic in the gold of spirit. Parables of wing and claw. Parcels of sound smashed into relation. Priapic perturbations. Exultation of contrarieties. I see something in flames, it's hot as a subjunctive, a call for calm. But not really. Something like calm. Akin to calm. The calm that churns secretly for singularity, a marriage of the moon and sun.

Element butter. At a box check a box star. Elongations of a moment of hair. Alembic goat kicking while blinking. A distant fishing embalms the manure of the office. And in the orchard a bear wanders the pungent odors of late fall. Rotten fruit. The glint of a needle in a black helicopter. Altimeter soup. The dizziness of altitude. The muslin belongs to an ancient gerund.

A distant path is dressing our spring in blackberries. Street lighting brings out Saturday’s colors in a lavender masculinity. Which is as feminine and chrome as anyone’s breasts, including chameleons and antique explosions. The sound of the table is based on chamomile. The sound of ants is lush with letters whose rustlings and propagations are awakened by your eyes.

Think of it as the sound of ointment throwing itself into a nutty jurisprudence. Law, all law, is an aching and a convulsing cross-eyed crocodile with an appetite for adjudication by jaw.

Am I overly negative? Am I admissible evidence? Is writing a burden of proof? Am I guilty? Am I innocent? Are words a continuance? Am I in contempt? This is a dismissal. I’m dismissing everything on grounds of malfeasance.

Aurignacian feet. Medieval underwear. This room makes craving a pencil a penetrating exercise in foam. I expressly run to approve a segment of nose in thematic meringue. What a beautiful feeling: I am blatantly against the jewels and cloths of the month of forks.

I support the strange beauty of realism, which is chloride and hurricanes, a scalding sense of demurral in a courtroom I invented for the love of mahogany. The tensions brought about by dying dwell in the sky like a cathedral whose stone has been quarried from a drug.

The carpenter’s algebra is a prolongation of spirit in the snow. The commas of the refrigerator blossom in the breath of the living. The sentence pauses to reflect on Hollywood, helicopters in our neurons making crochets of thought and thimble, and then rushes into battle, howling like a face. The tale of the stars finishes by lifting a bronze goblet in a claw heavily veined with Viking blood. The silverware streams juicily through lumps of rice.

The forests work themselves into twists and turns of elaborate, bifurcated wood. The splendor of Norway manifests its rocky aggregations and breathes its granite into the breath of heaven. This can be a sunset folded and put in a drawer. This can be a piece of music. Mushrooms grinning in a parable of accommodation.

Hold this. Hold these words in your eyes. Let them come into your cave and cause pounds of music to unroll on the earthen floor. Bear teeth, man with the head of an antelope with blood squirting out of his nose. It’s dark. But here comes a light. A wick afloat in animal fat. Think of it as a body of words, as a paragraph, as a geoduck, as a pebbly beach. The big eyes of a seal. An agate searched by rain. 

Shakespeare's Beard

I always feel pain in my right arm. It’s become a companion. And what’s this? This is a sentence swimming beneath my face. Human skin is phenomenally soft. Context is everything.

When was the last time you fired a gun?

Wisps of incense unroll into the air. Is there an art to enduring pain?

Follow me. I will show you the effulgence of the dawn as it ascends the Cascades to the east. A spoonful of maple syrup shining in sunlight. Trees hammered into shape by wind and rain. Smoke billowing out in plumes from a crack in the earth.

These words have been cooked in grammar. This is why we see Walt Whitman walking down a street in Camden, New Jersey. It’s the language of water. Rhythm makes us move.

Strange sounds echo in the darkness. Genitalia like being caressed.  A shovel breaks the ground. I want the fog to come out of my head and describe itself.

Music is an oasis of the ears. It’s hard to break free of the Matrix. Music helps. Music helps itself to the divinity within and shouts wake up! wake up! wake up!

The Black Angels, from Austin, Texas.

Think of me as a window, a sweet leap into the realm of dreams. What is this emotion beating against my ribs? My muscles revolve around my bones looking for something to do. It’s astonishing, the way the bones of the shoulder work in symphony. I want to behave indecisively to see what will happen. What might happen. What could happen. What happens. What is happening.

Truth and intuition advance the evolution of the T-shirt.

This is the place where the coyote stops and stares.

What is the origin of art?

A theory of light moves in its fur like an arctic fox. Metaphors enjoy a certain dispensation from the rigors of perceived reality. A cavern wall densely covered with the images of animals punctuate the irregularities of rock and make it alive with the grace of their lines.

Outside, the blood jingles with sunlight. Blue leans into green. Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Our language is in prison. Open the gates and let the words loose.

I have five wheels: four on the ground and one in my hand. Rebekah Del Rio sings “No Stars.” Welcome to the Terra Incognita of the human brain.

Reality is a constant creative enterprise. We create it as much as it creates us. Failure is the form life assumes when it concentrates too zealously on achieving the impossible.

Who is the dreamer? You’re the dreamer. I’m the dreamer. This is a dream. There is a swamp in my finger and a sample of daybreak emerging from a hole in Denmark. This is the syntax of the soul. These words are needles for sewing a fabric of light. The smell of animal fat burning in a stone lamp. Shakespeare’s beard flirting with the puppets of human folly. 

The Place

I write for people who don’t exist. Readers that don’t exist. How exciting is that? Consciousness is exhilarating. This is why I live on the moon. Do you know that feeling of floating in space? It’s good, isn’t it? Life is otherwise grounded in grammar. When you’re all alone in your lonely room there’s always something churning, something agitating, something that wants out. Be it an infinitive or a mood, it wants out. Let it out. Let it jump into life and swim. Being requires a constant becoming, even if you don’t own a pottery wheel.

Our house is in space riding a ball of rock. The prisons of social reality do not meddle here. Do not matter. Images are baked by desire. I feel the geometry of bone at play in my shoulder and knee. This is where pain resides. This is why I like to think about things. I like to put them into words.

For people who don’t exist.

Do objects speak to you? What do they say? Sometimes I will find an emotion buried in Spanish and dig it up and reanimate it with my mind. This is how language works. You keep tossing words into space until something assumes life and the luminescence of its thought can be seen glowing through the undulations of its profligate claims.

What do you feel when you get out of bed in the morning?

This is something I’d prefer not to talk about.

How do you put into words an experience said to be ineffable?

I want to envelop you in my arms. I want to wander a castle in Denmark pondering the visitation of ghosts. I’m often amazed by the accuracy of instinct. The man sobbing on the sidewalk is a violinist named Morel. He lives in a novel by Marcel Proust. Say hello. Bon jour, Monsieur Morel.

How do you explain the subjective quality of experience? I try everything: hammers, drills, washers, dryers, shovels, algebra, calculus, festival events, incense and gardenias.

The words will never be what I want them to be: boats, pumps, seeds.

Fish, ribbon, Renaissance art.

I can’t really control what an entire language wants to do when I begin to express myself using that very language. It got Hamlet into trouble and he knew how to see through people and fence and direct plays.

I see an army disappear into the hills. Who, at this stage in earth’s history, isn’t worried?

What can you do?

If an agate favors us with the shape of a camel, I will accept that as a sign of grace. Until then, I’m going to keep going on. Storms are much more intense now. It’s true that words set free can free us all. But they can’t repair the damage done. Reality is too obvious to be true, and yet nobody sees it. It’s too obvious to be seen.

This is the song of the misanthrope. This is the language of water. This is the place where the separation between the organic and inorganic ceases to exist. This is where reality comes to question itself.