All Contraries

Collective preening: this culture, this civilization, the “person.” What was it that looked along the seam a few minutes ago? Was it called me? A sense of heaviness and a sense of the round dark all. Some me pervaded, cloistered stick man, campaign of breath and return. Experience is not wholesome, not unifying, unitary or religious. All contraries are unitary in their silliness. Break down to arms and bones.

The Drugged and Stolen Night

Where is the pause and where is the fighter, where is the simple day of youth, where is the run-up to the show, where is the grey haven, the flitting look at the fairy message, the chanting steel toad, the bastard elbow, the crusted hashbag, the charnel house, the fractal enthusiasm, the smashing layoff, the frothy beard, the whispering foot, the hispering tundra, the show, the professional word, the incidental shyness, the bardic hymn, the gelid panther, the stinging past, the eclectic hum, the rotating powdermark, the sliding steed, the shale conundrum, the slowest dance, the rhythm of dogs, the window of gifts, the language crashers, the slandering philosophers, the insensate whelps, the sheer dogginess of time, the images of man and woman drawn large by animals, the half-thrown flail, the broken home on the border, the town where you raised yourself, the hair you shaved off, the weight of your past, the perseverance of history despite the lunacy of all populaces, the typecasting of the market, the unshouldered burden, the runt with the tickle in its throat, the goat, the herdsman, the New England irrelevancies, the lost and fully unforgotten loves, the bland stargazer, the revealed moment, the masterful giver, the Arctic African, the chlorinated burger, the sublimated post-it, the pudding-worm, the foot-breather, the depth-divider, the half-glance back at the lover who’s just left for good, the rusted ride, the bashful bicycle, the confidence of quarter-age, the drugged and stolen night, the sitting still, the mysterious new, the glorified expectation of non-recognition, the bored particle, the majestic bread, the waking yawn, the purposeful sunrise?

On Previous Days

You, that book, that ruggedized case, lost on logic. You took your meanings down, took down your peacoat, your savvy beatitudes, your empirical globe. You caught fish, showed the kids “how it’s done.” You weren’t prideful or too teacherly. You just wandered into the scene of the moment and gathered necessities. Sure, bodies decomposed under the floor and wraiths howled in dark corners. You were aware of them all, but you played life focused, also not denying librettos, spinning hubcaps, beach days. A man was responsible, then gone. In the middle of it a feeling of fellowship, rivers going by, rock formations in the sun, boots going up some mountains. Your own feet stepped behind you, on previous days.

A story told and a sketch of Vincent Price smiles and a laugh from a horse's mouth, doing a bit.

Daddy issues for everybody. Plenty of room for histrionics. Everyone was doing a stand-up job, but blowing the punchline. Even though you said your name, I still forgot your character. It was a disconnect, and it's personally insulting, despite the leather effigy and Mick Jagger's ability to do it right and be a scary good soldier. The scene cut is this: Two minutes before we grasp this moment, we find ourselves on skis, not even paying attention, but feeling like a million bucks. I love that feeling, like an athlete, without caring about approval. Who tells someone they are overtalking? People will strive to seek approval of someone who does the firing in person. Everything is sideways and you take it personally. The gnome calls you about all the reasons why, finally, and you want it to be true, although it's your imagination giving you the advice. Your performance watches you and says dollars are not really anything; very Buddhalike. At the end of the day it's you approving you, and the cliche of it clashes with the neuroses of the host, alongside the history of personalities. And I know you're doing this part, but when you find yourself doing it, it could be misinterpreted as weird, because of your family history of insanity. People who stayed the longest stayed because they felt like they belonged. Is the astronaut joke a joke, or just a reality? What was he looking for when he worked the probe, while he looked in my eyes, with his perfect afro? There was a ready symmetry to things. Like we'd made it to the waiting room during a long walk. Shiny, efficient, like we were going to win.

Mini-Twilight

How about a mini-twilight time, right after lunch, before we get back to work? We’ll meet before the day goes back to grinding, before all the real work needs to get back to itself. We can go into my office, turn out the lights, think some different thoughts. We'll write some stuff that’s free of the institutions in our heads. The world hears us listening all the time anyway; shouldn’t we make the most of it? The pants I have on are almost falling off, I’m always nibbling on seaweed, and I’m beginning to hear fish think, in my little apartment by the sea. In our Tiny Dusk we won’t make any plans, we’ll just crawl into a big sundress together and laugh at the glowing stars I’ve stuck to the ceiling. And music? Yeah, big guitar sounds like swans and blues riffs that guarantee a decent hermetic seal.

Invitation

What: Some long-suffering thing about Ways, and/or The Front’s ability to challenge all of Time’s harbors. Where: Beside (or right in) a desert of forgotten collectibles. When: Sixteen if you’re lucky, but probably more like thirteen, when you started realizing you had a reason (a mind or a piece of luggage like it) that brought more chaos to the halls than most kids around you could even conceive. How: via sitting and thinking, not by talking or writing. Who: anyone who appreciates the power in a nipple, or the utterly rebellious act of sleeping long and long.

"Cheeseman's Emotional Energy Theory"

"--There is another theory, you know. That you can change the past. That you can really change it.

--What theory is that?

--Cheeseman's.

--Cheeseman's?

--Cheeseman's Emotional Energy Theory. It's true. Cheeseman believed if you can concentrate enough energy in a moment in time...then you could alter the past and create a new future.

--What kind of energy? Nuclear?

--Emotional. Love energy. Hate energy. It's very potent stuff, you know.

--Really?

--Cheeseman worked with fruit flies, and then he realized...they didn't have enough emotional energy. It was kind of low. But then he thought, humans are creative, sensitive creatures. Maybe they could muster up enough energy to actually...break the causal chain, alter the past and create a new future.

--So then what happens to the old future?

--It'd still be there. There'd be two futures. The one you left and the one you're creating. They'd exist simultaneously, parallel to each other.

--No. Not parallel universes.

--It's only a theory. It hasn't been proven...

--Yet."

The Cradle

Shaking hands. Busted tablature. Fiddle sounds and a rejected swimmer. Tingling sun moments and a bright beach pail from your earliest memory. Cue the piano, line up at every restaurant that wants you. That’s all of them? But your green dress, that easy smile, I fell so easily. I whisper so loudly now, through tears, about what we once held. We were a cradle, you must sense that, that nurtured everything we wished we could actually say.

Staying

Tickling the ticking world, the giggling girl. The freak resonance of sequins in your hollow fists, the sheer butter of the pavement you feel when going fast. The trance of the past. Continuance of night deliberations. All and more, and more. Once you saw me enter and my talk dropped off, I was something beyond a telephone, and we bodied. It was effective and there was a slight intermission. Shady telegrams from the future quit arriving. The intelligence of cities and plays was all full of music. Even the movements of our hands overlaid us with pauses. We were some kind of void that time could fill. Then dim pillars buckled and hands opened on wings and someone’s loved one passed away, then another, another. We held the beats within us. The wonder of the future is a crash of waiting and staying cold. Some knowing is too much. That’s the brink we walk away from. How walking wakes our wonder, we may know.

The Hat Of The World

What is the pantry and what the relic, what the groundsman and what the fuse, what the fidgeter and what the quay? The pants and the sheets and the queasy feeling and the trying after glory and the dancing and the apartments and the staying and the leaving and the breathing. The it, the it, the it, the identification of it, the shining, the sadness, the shine and sadness and lightning and stability of children and stomach. And seeing, the them, the endless them, the them-ing and the us-ing and the we-ing and the fleeing and returning and going and simple happiness of making words and going with ease. The going with ease the non-tooth-pulling aspect of freedom from fear and staying in that bubble. In Tahiti, in ease in Tahiti. In finding, we get happily lost, in oceanic striving, letting go of striving, getting lucky as it all happens away from us, close to us, we seek to sit in a silence that golds us up. And we do. That silence golds us up and we shatter the rain-frame and we run into it, collide with the pervasive sand in our shoes, in our eye-corners, in our happy peopled skin, brown in the sun and sharing it all without wanting or waiting, just sitting in the gold of silence, the hat of the world.

Here

Here’s what you remember: You remember the rain, and going into the rain. You remember trees giving way to ashes and ashes giving way to hands. And you wished for a galaxy of grey panels, of rain in cloaks, of melted nights blending together on trains, near lakes, in puddles and fields of blackbirds. You gathered in your sheets, moved with the movement of air through a window, placed your hands against cool glass. You preferred everything, in general, and you spoke always about flowers and young mourners and celebrations with fire. In every word you spoke, you heard the echo of water. It began as memory and became a drumming of white petals against a wet roof. Animals forgot themselves and you twisted into their happy movements. The pink angles of Everything made a return and you wore a flower to commemorate Everything.

Being Interested

He talks and talks again, making a theory into a candy, a bike. There is a beyond, for purposes swim in 365 pages, appearing in a book, making things for the impulse. There is something interesting about being interested in sitting, in scythes as fair grounds.