Diluted in scattered thought—

Romare Bearden’s collage “Pittsburgh Memory” (1964).

I s’ppose I will not prate along too much (not I!), but the other evening while engaged drastically in lyrical-eyeings of the public-mannerisms of people (feeling more strange than Hiroshima Day), I scribbled this down on a small piece of paper: Odd diadem, memorable bloaks without cloaks—Walking down the street, “no additional action required”—The “looks” on people’s faces, expecting a response after someone has already explained the answer to them—The sky could be my entire mass this day, sweaters of clouds and bulging hand-veins and pinky-toe spider-bites—I need a shower, I want to get out of this place, vendors of floating, of disappearing without an “act.” —“If life is one long delicious process” why are there so many rotten eggs and apples that try and spoil it for the ones that know better? What is Knowing Better? What silly questions. Must keep myself entertained. The plastic surgeon in the film Dark Passage says to Bogie as he prepares to get plastic surgery: “I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived.”

—

Frank O'Hara: “These aren’t tears anyway, just eye gunk”

—

Driving down the highway, like a lost puppy, ding-dinging of concentration, this evening, saw the full moon hovering, realized that the moon is always “full.” A kind of calm comeuppance. Munching like Edvard Munch.

Attempting to explain a dream to someone is like trying to explain color to a blind person.

And here is a thought: Gather all the dead poets’ living relatives, speak with them spookily in favor of misbegotten realism. In one guise or another. Gather the poets’ relics, their out-of-leaping zombie-possibles (imagining Verlander as white (?) as John Kasper)—there is no city of comparable size to the poet’s heart, his swollen crest, universe-wide, panorama-vastness, everywhere in motion, to be aped in thinking or raped of thought, blood excited by words, boils, language tearing through me like the power of hydraulic rams’ horns. In this sleepy town I sleep, while the candle-makers are fiery, while a middle-aged couple walks their dog around the neighborhood on a repetitive loop, while Hollywood intoxicates with their paddle-engined films—the baker, the butcher, the lawyer, the doctor, the street artist, the pawnbroker, the middle-man all fashion in their giddy states while I sleep, asleep beyond normal standards, awoken to the wondering lights and ghostly music of this poetry within, scratched out in waxed grooves, prism inscriptions like an interrupted séance.

My neck grows tighter than jodhpurs! Who’s pulling on my vines, this fertilized garden of my uncomfortable Morticia Addams-like snippets of flower-buds? This day, each day, to appreciate the vital revelations of these magnificent proportions, multitudes of meticulous attention given to grandiose dimensions, as intense as an angry man’s drive, like a little Irish steam packet rocking forcefully amidst grey air in a wild sea, driving the continents flippo. I admit that I have forgotten that this was any text at all. This, a mere sketch, diluted in scattered thought.

There is no such thing as “a long day” (like, “Oh, it’s going to be such a long day!”). Every day has the same time as it did yesterday and the day before that, and will be that way tomorrow and days after that. Eerie and Surprising go airbourne, which makes me wistful, feeling like a tidal flow, and “All there is to do now is scream.” Fred Astaire, Red Skelton? Someone.

My attitude is this: I will leave a note for anyone in a guest room, just as I will leave my fragrance upon the air or a smile upon a stranger. Spoke with a woman that once met The Herman Hermits. She had signed up to win a chance to meet the band, and lo and behold, she won. “They were quite nice.”

Just love what you do and it may love you back, depending on the box of chocolates, and the window’s eyes, like the widow’s eyes, stalks the country-side, or the city’s sidewalks, all of the other buildings and avenues and street corners, perhaps the green meadows, brown fields, industrial gunk. The window may also see the angry shapes, the foreheads and upturned mouths. This is the moment where the philosopher should stay wholly silent as if there were dimensions to change, as if there were seasons to “holding one’s tongue” (not the horses), and the horses gallop like the stillness of seamstresses that stress silence in their concentrative strokes. I am alone this night, and every tiny subtle noise sounds overexaggerated, rocket-blasts, over-animate. Mind of surround-sound. Bendable balloons. Vocabulary pulled from my throat. Binocular-vision, dream slit open, peculiar extremities, love-it-or-loathe-it-type smithereens.

Exoskeletal wireless interface with the mind of a dolphin.

Jinxonyou.