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The Méret Oppenheim Teacup Solution
My wrinkles arrange the beak by which I speak. I lean forward. I lean backward. I light an energy to glide into cockeyed.
The clatter beneath our prayers has the sound of oarlocks in a bayou. If you allow the embryonic a place in this denim, we’ll find ourselves an intriguing intestine to describe. It will grow into pigs.
Biology is a symptom of grace. The prodigal makes it flourish. This linen moans with acceptance. I can feel it in the sparkle of your eyes. This junkyard of words and expressions. This long tall sally. This plump verification of wax. We draw up experiments there drop by drop. The local pharmacies pay us with locomotives.
Have you ever tried putting a diesel locomotive in a coin operated parking meter? Good luck finding a parking meter. They use apps now.
We use our locomotives as one might a Méret Oppenheim teacup: that is to say, sometimes a great notion deserves something better than a dying security. It needs trees and sweet morning air. A good roll in the hay. And a Méret Oppenheim teacup.
Meanwhile, my plan is to treat the bacteria with respect until a disease gets here. It may be a while. Wings smear our bohemia with pushing and pulling. The nation has lost its bearings. Only a disease like fandango can cure us of horizontality. What’s the trick to burning mushrooms, anyway? All I require for now is a donkey, a compass, and a Lucinda Williams album. Look over there and watch as I bend my journey to the caress of her music.
Assume an aroma and strut around. I welcome the mint on my tongue. A language vessel can sigh for rattan, but it takes a supreme court decision to establish oligarchy. They squeeze the medicine and clash with its precepts. Can anyone say they were surprised? You can peer through a submersible window to see the luminous monsters swimming by in hourglass cotillions. But will it bring you heat and credibility? Will it corner your demons in rum? Soon after my languish vanished, I saw it shattered on the ceiling. And that’s when I knew. I knew everything. Everything there is to know about drumsticks. And Malibu. And the perverse craving I have for lilacs.
Once again. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you’re contemplating a career, consider Méret Oppenheim’s teacup. Her fur teacup. Sip your ambitions and struggle against the tide. I won’t stop you. I don’t even know you. Growl yourself into denim so I can see you better. Surely as sleep approaches morning, the sun will scatter its temptations all over spring. We’ll know better then. Better what to do. And what not to do. And put it in a constitution. And send it to El Salvador.
The Conveniences Of Sleep
I have an older version of myself that I hire out for jobs like this. It makes me want to explode into feathers just to parade it around. I gratify it with gasoline as I expect to skidoodle soon. A poem is a machine made of encyclopedias. I can explain its piercing hysteria by a tonic blast of fluttered rum. Steel evolved to crack a tradition. Otherwise, habits enlist in complementary swans. No one can escape the ground, given the size of the hive we’ve waxed. All I really want to do is go against despair by pulling my bloodstream into the garden. Everything I know is how fast headlights can taste like space. It makes me want to do something hirsute. I imitate the glow of a mosaic. And all of Belgium turns rough and unpredictable with a powerful incentive to dance. Sometimes life requires a little energy. A few potatoes. A sack of haboob. And a way to harness a burning hairbrush with a team of cross-eyed Baedekers. I wrestle a strolling yardstick since it flows out of elocution. But it’s all effulgent. Every bit of it. Including the handshake.
Words can be a burden. They can also be a song. Or a dream of smoke and tigers. Do I need a deductible for this? Tears mingled in Death Valley stars boil down to glittering mirrors of stunning remorse. There’s a space between the emotions that technocratic hype can’t reach. Life has options. You can upholster a scab with gunpowder, or sit in a swivel chair listening to the feelings of other people. Why is bingo so compelling? Is it the tumbling of balls in a raffle drum, the pale locutions of ceremony? I find the sand to be much more forgiving. It affirms the weight of one’s being with every step. I gaze at the horizon and admire the sanity of the beyond. The vast blue decorum of nullity that serves as a suburb of death until the stars come out and grace the sky with the grandeur of eternity. When was the last time you felt like robbing a jewelry store? There’s nobody here but introspection. You can hear it in the wind as it stumbles through this sentence seeking to unfold something actual, something rambunctious and baldly inadvertent. The rap of rain on a window. Frank O’Hara banging something out on a typewriter.
Everybody wants a new relationship to reality. The old reality is dead. The new reality has yet to fully reveal itself. Contraries and contradictions get fat on this injury I call existence. Meanwhile, I need a place to gather my wits and enjoy some quenelle. Some Schuman nocturnes. Abstraction is the lightning that comes late at night and dances on your lips. It’s a funny feeling and can’t be corralled with a rope and a dictionary. Anyone who knows what it means to parallel park a Cadillac Escalade in lower Manhattan can appreciate the value of power steering. It’s a different world. I keep looking at it with the old perspectives. Monstrosities of moral architecture rise out of the collective unconscious demonstrating what is tenable and what is untenable. What is ethical and what is antithetical. Whatever happened to critical thinking, or the pH of potting soil? I have nothing to say to the darkness except thank you. I have an affinity for stories set in Key West. One of those places that haven’t been sullied by the determining resin of having gone there. And that’s when I discover the charm of parachuting up instead of down, and the conveniences of sleep.
Tell You What
Tell you what: I’ll patent your invention if you patent mine. What is this flap if not flax bark? I found a stick of gestures in the elephant airfield. I’m my own counsel regardless of public use. But if you tell me about your paradox, I’ll tell you about my socks. It was Paul Dirac who pioneered renormalization. Indentations are for sissies. Emissions such as these arise from the interactions of virtual particles. It involves redefining the fundamental parameters of human lubricity. It’s a sport that consists in freeing yourself of your body. If only we could make people understand what a truly beautiful bookstore is capable of. It frees us of our uneasy circumstances on earth to imagining existence elsewhere. Once you find the bodily position most conducive to thought, you can coax it into Being as a bildungsroman, or wear it like a forest.
If you can the bear this alligator rope I’ll show you a way to laugh next to the stump while simmering with rocks. I’m able to entertain us at the seaside. But you’ll need a better pair of libraries. The mockingbird war pressed us before the morning had spilled itself on the wheat. It helps to gracefully curve your deviation. The upper body turnup dumbbell exercise will quicken the wrinkles so that I may translate the charcoal. Barbarians are considered backward, but has anybody checked the corporation? The Black Keys will now perform Chulahoma.
May we intertwine effectively near the buttons, and make the crash of predicates athletic. It's all just a jumble of nails compared to the discreet hissing of the secretion of a spider's silk thread in the construction of a circumstance. Insults on cotton look like letters. But a really good web will weigh the slap of existence with the delicacy of angels. I put my fires out inside. I don’t let them burn a philosophy down, especially if there’s an idea struggling to get free of the words. It takes a pretty large cocoon to produce a healthy contradiction. I’m not going to lean against the air and pretend I’m anything other than a mirror. I can’t help it if it’s got your face in it. Someone left the door open and a metaphor got out. The enigma, meanwhile, is pouring itself into meaning.
The medication paints me horizontally. I see a personality. Meanings finger it with pathos. The reality of tinfoil relies on a request for salt. Soon, the pain will begin to simmer in its cradle of hymns. The coffee is already a riddle. Our halibut churns with solicitations. The thing that makes a sentence makes us disappear. Invisibility serves to fit our hunger against the severity of logic in a piece of grammar. This is how the images occur. They crawl out from the bottom of a pyramid and polish the sky with their tangibility until it rains artists. This is why the sky is always inflated. The science of it is a texture which is why I like its astronomy rubbed all over my ink.
These are chrome emotions to which I attach spoons. My other emotions are chowder. I sip them in the dark. A few of my feelings are blue. There are no new birds, just a wading pool, a folly gazebo and a car repaired with alphabets and glue. I’ve taken an oath under the oak by the edge of the known universe. From now on, I shall try to be more fully present at my periodic absence. It takes a majestic abstraction to break a reality into little choices. It can be done. You can do it. I’ve seen the buffalo at Yellowstone turn pink in the blaze of a rampant harangue. And the lucidity of the mineral springs is dangerously alluring. But a full autonomy takes years to recognize. You have to start early in life, before you turn sclerotic, and stubbornly chiaroscuro.
Lick Tongue
The poem poses itself as a hypothesis, but also, insofar as it is endowed with language, as a kitchen appliance, or clearing in the woods, i.e. Heidegger’s metaphor for the unveiling of truth, and the nature of Being. Lichtung. Sounds a little like “lick tongue.” To say nothing about our new toaster. It’s a humdinger. A whirlwind of innovation. Filaments beam heat toward the bread until the face of Niki de Saint Phalle appears. I’m reminded of a mosaic I saw during a walk one late afternoon in the streets of Ravenna, the City of Mosaic. There was the odor of frankincense, and a mood of prickly electrolysis tinged with revelation. That little boost the sunlight gives to a slice of pink might serve as an example of lebenswelt. Paragraphs are mosaics. Fragments of life rendered in the tesserae of words. One night, Janis Joplin broke a bottle of Southern Comfort over Jim Morrison’s head. I scooped up the pieces and made a mosaic. This is that mosaic. A small deposit of the past maneuvered into the present, by way of a mental act committed in a state of noetic angora. Think of a mountain whose summit pierces the sky. A place where time doesn’t exist. Only rock. And snow. And pieces of Jim Morrison’s mind.
Why does Blanchot refer to language as a murderer of existence? Because the traction I pull with a pen is respectable, but completely theoretical. Nothing I say here exists. Nor may it be held against me in a court of incongruity. Innocence is never trees. It’s always paradoxical. Like a lotus in a brothel. Or a flow of warm intent. I say I study symmetry and symmetry appears. I say drive and the chauffeur drives. I don’t have a chauffeur. And this is what makes language dangerous. I sat down and had a good cry. I have emotions for fantasy that I use when I want to become invisible. But it never works. It only makes things worse. Or so it seems at first. As soon as my history changed I got out a notebook and wrote everything down. Language is the mediating will of that which slowly rises towards the oak. I inflated a metaphor to the point of definition and it burst. It shed my sweat in a riot of words and evocations. I looked around. This was a new environment. Things are bald and bone black and meat and nickel. A column of water descends into chaos. The way a faucet caresses a grapefruit. And splatters everywhere.
Here's a word: oak. The oak becoming oak. The root becoming leaf, the leaf becoming grace. The spirits we cement into place alongside their destruction. The spirit of place. The spirit of absolution. The spirit of renewal. The spirit of healing and ooze. A moose in a grove of oak. A slight breeze to rustle the swallows. And fill the forest with consciousness. The line is straight but as an explorer I want to deviate. If there’s a nerve there it’ll hit the landscape and give us a chance to describe it. Otherwise, I'm here on the stem. Watching it all unfold.
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