These Are The Words I Meant To Put Here

These are the words I meant to put here. These are the ones. The very ones. But they won’t be here for long. They know how to fly. But they don’t know where to go. May I suggest L’Aiguille du Midi? It’s a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif in the French Alps. You can take a cable car to the summit, where you’ll find a panoramic viewing platform, a snack bar, a café, a restaurant, a gift shop, and a glass skywalk called “Step into the Void.” Which is precisely what these words are doing. They’re stepping into the void. I’d describe it to you if I could. But not with these words. These are the words that stayed behind. The other words have already flown off. They could be in the stratosphere of Beethoven’s Fifth. Or tinkling cubes in a bourbon sidecar. They could be anything. They could be anywhere. What frustrates me are the things they could say if they were here. What things look like elsewhere. Mont Blanc? Titan? Louisiana? Lithuania? Or maybe they didn’t fly off at all. They’re right here. These are the words. The very words by which I meant to say something and have long forgot. Which otherwise had been a place to go.

I like the splatter of ebony and agate. I like the splendor of you. Your obsidian eyes. Your golden nose. Your strange beliefs. You. Yes you. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being here. Was that you the other day walking under the Aurora bridge on Mercer reading a book? It is generally assumed that there’s an element common to our experiences of works of art. Whenever I hear a library, I meet a milieu. In the event we’re confronted with a great difficulty in determining precisely what is and what is not probable, it's always best to consult a contusion for evidence of our collisions. Why can't I stand up and tell myself I'm strong? What can I say to you that will stand the test of time and give you orgasms of stellar import and reveal the hidden valleys of you? I will say nothing that will implicate me in your private life. I've never been there. I hear it's beautiful. Perhaps you could send me a post card. I love post cards. Pataphysical ones especially. Big mushrooms. Spectacular tuna. Squirrelly urges. Photogenic odors. Colorful sounds. Moody modes. Sunset panoramas emanating the golden light of heaven. A grizzly bear eyeing a ham sandwich. Which is Buddha. Can you do it? Can you wait? I’ll be right back with a fresh glass of music. Have you ever caught yourself talking to someone who isn’t there? I’m not here to defend their toys. I’m here to dredge something up from the depths of Wilson Pickett. Get it recorded. Save the world. Except, of course, he’s gone. You can’t record the dead. You can only talk to them. Who knows if they’re listening? I’m going to wait for the midnight hour; that’s when my love begins to shine. Just you and I. Who are you, by the way? There’s a world rupturing in me. I apologize for the noise. Some call it poetry. Some call it null. I call it to my window and pour wine on its skull. Now I know. I remember. I know who you are. The reader I keep imagining. The reader that truly reads. And finds what I couldn’t find when I wrote these words. But don’t. Don’t tell me what it is. It belongs to you. The whole shebang. So please. Take it. Whatever it is. It’s yours. 

Soloing

But really, what is it about climbing rock walls at dizzying heights that so excites the mind? Is it the imminence of death? Death is always imminent. I think it's the extreme immediacy of it all. The extreme focus. The extreme tactility of fingertips working their way into tiny fissures, the extreme sensations of temperature and tension and weight. There’s no room for rumination. Only the deep awareness of every movement. This isn’t the paradigm I was born into. I’m terrified of heights. But I get it. The feeling of being alive becomes so intense the personality of a single hair is a monad of hammers and vowels. Limits assume illimitable acknowledgement, the churning of clouds in the luminous distance doing what rivers do when no one is looking. I like to watch logic melt into lunacy. The holiness of closet doors opening to the ghostly clatter of clothes. Confirmations of excess in the pain of the lower back. Distortion is crucial to priests. There are loopholes nobody can see but wizards. They know the ropes, those guys. Do wizards still exist? Witches exist, God love them, and so do wizards. I saw one just the other day walking down the sidewalk with a python wrapped around a tattooed torso, eating a peach. It was an odd day, curiously moody, with a touch of innovation. Everything felt so phenomenal my being dilated and reached for a corollary. Nothing needs forgiveness like a simulacrum. Are eyebrows seismographs or goldfish? Seismographs, obviously. They go up when they feel a tremor of alarm. Though some are clearly some form of Arthropoda. The beetle brow is a tirade of hair. Whenever I sit beside myself I do so with a secret incentive, which is one of modesty, and sheer therapy. There’s a wildcat on my lap and a searchlight in my mind. The sensations thrilling through my veins are evidence of a nimble underworld just now unearthed by a bumpy salvation. A jeep ride through the seven canyons of Kenya will lengthen one’s phallic understanding of pillars and arcs. If you whisper these thoughts to the hummingbird there will be rain in the morning and upheaval in the empire. And so I asked R during our run on Westlake today what she thought the phrase “life is tiiiiit” written in red letters on the white ice machine beside the mini-mart meant. She didn’t know either. Why five i’s? I is the largest one letter word in existence. The injuries testify to the daily shit show. Conversing with one’s wounds will sometimes produce a grimace. There’s a kind of eloquence in pain that goes vertical if you squeeze it with a little truth. One finds relief from the chicanery & superficialities of the internet in the objectivity of hardware. It’s a different world than the one was born in. In that world, Philip Lamantia opened a legendary reading at a space in San Francisco while I played Daniel Boone in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Years later we would marvel at the reliquaries of Clara and Saint Francis Assisi, and the day would be divinely auspicious, its colors awakened by sunlight.

Beside Yourself With Ralph

Perception is often still regarded as a physiologically determined reaction to a perceivable object. But you won’t see any of that around here. What I call shaggy I call hirsute and what I call cardboard I call zigzag. When the red house over yonder was built the people gargled one another like alcoholics in the San Diego Aquarium. This gave suppleness to the flowers and confusion to the metaphors. I was susceptible to dizziness back then, but my gardenia was good at predicting the weather, and I had a dog named Talk who never talked. I was a little preoccupied at the time but I had the space to admit it and the temerity to play it out. And so I stood around imitating England at the end of a diving board while the crowd below waited for me to do a backflip. I know none of my opinions matter, but I also happen to know that all of them matter, at least until I find the right Cézanne to make my point. I spit confusion into my grasp and walked away, a little hurt that people told me I sounded like a mosquito whenever I read poetry. Ok, then, from now I’ll call it prose and open my eyes to intercourse. Intercourse is discourse with a bite. Some might call it an interlude, some might call it a night. Distortion is the most efficient means to make Chicago look like New Orleans. And vice versa. You can have the versa. I’ll take the vice. I’m feeling busy from being clumsy all the time, which is especially hard to do in a men’s room. Allow me to present you with an itch as I stand by your side and scratch it. It’s my way of thanking you for pushing all these words to the end of the sentence. I will rise now and brown a pound. If you think pink is fun you should try cobalt. This is the color of need, which – by supposition – is beside yourself with Ralph. He’s a good guy. Completely imaginary. 100% Technicolor. That’s his ooze in the creosote room, circulating on the walls like a feeling. I will say no more about you know who, except to say that he misses you and that gaping hole you carried with you everywhere like a vowel of constant lipstick. This modified everything and made it happen good, like I knew it would, once I figured out the operating manual, & flipped the right switch. As soon as I verify those spots on Jupiter I will share it with Saturn and we’ll have a good laugh on Uranus. If you lean in close you’ll see that I’m up to something here. Some call it writing. Some call it obstreperous. I call it keep talking. I call it wet and Tuesday. You’ve got to call it something. Existence tastes stronger if it’s boiled in a little hallucination, then served on the soft vaginal folds of a lingual franca. The implications can talk for themselves.

Dusty Coils

Dusty coils drop from an upper shelf. It’s always like this in a garage. It helps to have a ladder handy. If you can climb into heaven you can amplify your experience of life. Note the fauna. Note the flora. Bubbles give the river away. When spring arrives flowers bloom with an almost maniacal intent. Swimming is erratic in consciousness. The currents are funny. Unpredictable. You know what I’m talking about. The self-consciousness of finding oneself the only customer in a gift shop awakens a dimension of being that savors of volition. It makes you dizzy, this nothingness of future possibilities. Why nothingness? Why is it nothing? Is nothingness nothing? The universe is a cauldron of bubbling entropy, a blistering slop of muddling energy fluctuations and continuous conversion between various forms of energy and matter. It’s hard to choose just one thing on the menu. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. It helps me understand the realm of color. Every choice leads to something providential, something growling and alive and pacing back and forth in its cage. Falling in love. Winning money. Losing money. A lyrical submersion in absinthe. Selecting the right pair of reading glasses. There have always been moments like this. Events so subtle, so small, they barely register on the mind at all. Tiny things. Paper clips. Rubber bands. Raisins. Reasons. Recipes. Rice? Sure. I like rice. Rice is ideal for arbitration and weddings. But if you're worried about forged documents and contract negotiations, I'd look for a good watermark. They’re pretty too. Like the opening notes of John Lennon's Julia. I’d like to step out of this paragraph and give you a big hug. I should probably take a bath first. Bath? Did I say bath? I never take baths. I prefer showers. It helps with my tinnitus, too. Masks it. I’m continually occupied with the nude body, which is well adapted to this kind of work. Red erupts as the color green rides through me. I’m literally exploding, flailing about, looking for the right blue, the ideal teal for this gig. People say I’m too aggressive. I tell them that the best way to rob a bank is to own a bank. What do you call those people that climb rock walls without any equipment? Free solo climbing. Just shoes and chalk. Dialing in finger cracks. Using nothing but their wit. Their guts. Fancy footwork. Skeleton, muscles, and skin. Life isn’t a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. Said Kierkegaard. I’m not sure how that applies here, dangling from a rock 1,000 feet above certain death, but that said, I can feel a lyrical wind rising, and this, too, shall take wing, and let go.

I Ride A Floating Piano

I ride a floating piano. I’m not playing it. Just riding around on it. Floating along with the music. Sometimes you can barely make out something moving in the sand and then you do and you can’t take your eyes off of it. I jabber about perspective a lot but it’s not tin or rubber and I don’t need it here. I need something that stays thin, like the sound of a violin, that expands in the air until it becomes conciliatory. Death is at the very heart of metaphysics. But let’s not drag that in just yet. Let it come of its own accord, on the back of a donkey, tattooed and stratospheric. The thermometer isn’t talking to me anymore. I don’t know what the temperature is. But I can hear some of the words rattle like gourds of amorous wisdom. Wisdom is always in love with something. Quite often something vague and impossible to obtain. Which isn’t wise at all. But whoever said wisdom was wise? Maybe it’s just a resigned reflection in reaction to our current times, which are all chaos and volatility, like a mean-spirited thirteen-year-old girl. I’m not impugning anyone’s sex here. I hope. I don’t mean to. I never met a reproductive organ I didn’t like. But let them be for now. They don’t call them privates for nothing. I invite you instead to feast your eyes on the panorama before you. It’s that Sibelius violin concerto again, the one conducted by Mikko Francq, with Hilary Hahn on violin. Tonight I’m mending the flow of the arena. The entire thing, tier by tier if I have to. I crave a shovel. And a panacea. I’m tired of twirling this pain around like a cowpie. It’s time to let it go, watch it whirling off into space and then sit down and tend to my needs. You know the ones. Those. Imitations never work. You’ve got to have the real thing. Or the experience falls flat. That we fail to find in experience any elements intrinsically incapable of exhibition as examples of general theory is the hope of rationalism. Which is the whole reason I volunteered to come here in the first place. I’m not here for the cheese. I’m here for the rationalism. And a big bowl of Platonic forms. The kind I used to enjoy in Aristotle’s kitchen. Do you see this suet? This marks the deliverance of the environment. The accordion thinks it’s grain. If I try summoning a cry, I will bump into my own shadow, and welcome the whispers of spice coming to me from the island. We’ve been at sea a long time now. It’s time we undid our reluctance and accepted the crabs for what they are, crustaceans and therapists. Everyone is uniquely suited to pursue their own horizon, even if it means clomping around in the sand. The game of narrative requires a heavy disposition, a penchant for scores that can smash any barrier and come out the other side stirred and enriched.

The Song In The Head

I can trigger a quintessential absence if I there’s enough propane available to weld a hindsight to a premonition. I could also use a paper pillow and a parkway nonchalance. There must be something I can do. I have motorcycles in my breath. Achievement hangs about me like a dead crow. I could do almost anything that might require a little acting on the side. And with a little more chutzpah, I could disassemble a theological pain. But for that I would need a golden magnet and the liquid scarf of a brooding scorpion. The thumb is pungent when the sublime is yawning. The garage is the right place for a midnight tryst. But if the vertigo is emphatic enough to sprawl out in shadows, there must also be long postulations to mitigate against the ensuing ambiguity. Or encourage it. I’m not trying to be vague or self-indulgent. Time results from pulling things into existence, then sewing them into embellishments of meaning. The metaphors parade through town stimulating romance. It’s all I can do to hold back the skin of indication.

Oh sure, the Lady Gaga joker movie might turn out to be the very thing we need to turn things around. Cryptocurrency contains enough bold and beautiful spoilers to make any wedding a pleasant distraction from a hair loss lawsuit. But you might want to stop playing with your balls, however discreetly. When John Donne was ordained in 1615 at the age of forty-three, his earlier tendencies were not forgotten. There is nothing more metaphysical than a Cadillac. It has to do with the vapors of dawn and the beauty of robbing an East Texas bank. I’ll let this totem stand. The Corot is for coherence. The moon is too big to garden. But it’s a good way to spend the afternoon. You might think I’m a cowboy or something, but I’m not. I’m only the residue of a hypothetical willingness to climb into the haggard voice of a rocking chair & chop the daylight into chunks of folklore. Whatever you’ve done in the past, you can leave it here. I’ll figure out something to do with it. Meanwhile, check out Edith Sitwell. She wrote a great book about Bath.  

Poets enchant the world. That’s their job. It’s what they do. Because reality doesn’t dry up with platitudes. Au contraire. You know that feeling that comes from the rhythms of Bo Diddley? It’s like that. Meet the metaphors. The band is good tonight. Even Keats got up to dance. Life is a satori of rags & chemistry. But don’t let that fool you. Everything I’ve said so far is teeming with éclairs. Adjusting to life in the 21^st century requires a lot of pastry. Good pastry. Italian bomboloni, Peruvian picarones, Austrian krapfen. The mind is separate from the world. Otherwise, why would I press my stethoscope against the night? It’s adorably plump, and I can hear its pulsars throbbing like a heartbeat. Does age really matter? I wash my face with the tears of the moon. But my nails are done by sea lions. And rocks. So what do you say? Let’s sail into the mystic with dolphins at our side and diphthongs hanging from our lips. Nothing smells worse than a geothermal burp. Do that. Jiggle your gardenias. Beat time. Do handstands in Kenya. The enthusiasm alone will make a man of you. Women get it. It should be a worldwide thing. Art that drags itself across the floor like hot red buckets of Martian soup. And explodes into paradise. 

The Music Of The Unknown

The smell of gold pours a lambent odor on the periphery of a flower. This is the music of the unknown. It bends to hear the skin of a calendar. Prehistory is foggy this year. The lights are softly dimmed and the effect is an option. You can either face reality or do whatever reality is writing down in your inner Mick Jagger. And then make a song out of that. Maybe that’s all we need, a little red rooster and a desolation striking the air with surprising force. You don’t expect that from paint. And when language tries to substitute paint for reality, the effect can be a Spanish bus station, and an old woman in a black shawl selling rolls of toilet paper to people on their way to the rest room. It makes you take another look at credit. Is life worth the investment? As a general characteristic, it’s cynicism that keeps me going. Keeps me talking. And when I encounter old friends, I enjoy the sensations of delirium groping around in my soul for something to say. The language of earth is invoked to open the dirt and let the elves come staggering out in a state of extreme intoxication. This is the narrative I originally greased with the seaweed of shipwrecks. I mean, you know, the mushrooms of the human chest. I no longer have ambitions. I have socks. I’m going to walk through a tunnel now, and when I come out the other side, I will hand you the beginning of stars. The gold in the apple of nothingness.