=

Jan Mankes, Self-portrait, 1911

I mentally shrug my shoulders a lot.

. . .

The television is echoing, or is The Echo. Verdi Cries playing softly. Tonight, the air is quiet. The yard is one enormous text-well, should I jump into it, I think I should, and this means that I can bring another shirt to change in, or maybe I will wear a wig and will not doubt that this is really how to forget where you are for a moment. Restoring moods. Snapping out of it, a fantasy. Sadness ensues when I hear insults from people’s mouths, slandering others, themselves even, and nature. Those “unsightly leaves” . . . really? I apologize for them. I stepped on a group of crunchy brown leaves the other day and then apologized to them afterwards. This triggers chain-reactions for discussions in areas and subjects, when things are true, without _____ and _______. Nevermind. Just turn a blind eye.

Some people’s faces say, “Just let me feel disappointed.” Big smiles, fake smiles, smirks, grins like a villain. Pair of fragile eyes, a fragile voice, like Karen Peris from the Innocence Mission. That kind of “soft.” What needs ruthless interpretations? Unfittable dentures? Indisputable facts are disputable if you want to dive clear into controversy; the embrace of realistic acting, but poorly demarcated. My new favorite carniverous plant is the Utricularia parthenopipes. Some people should only rely on their mouths to eat and nothing else. A mouth that speaks foulness in the foul air, makes the head tight, uncontrolling words veer, crash, burn. The result of such deeds?

I spoke with a 59 year-old woman the other day that said that she was once a hippy. She told me a story: “I remember going to Canada once with a group of friends, really nothing but a bunch of herders [laughing], had long hair down to my waist, head bands, beads everywhere, and was the only one that really resembled a hippy. So, as we were about to cross the border, the security guards checked me first because they thought that I was a druggie! I wasn’t, of course, but I couldn’t blame them for checking! But then I realized that I was the only one that they had checked!”

A mouth that has never been kissed is like a seed that has never been watered. Does a seed “expect” precipitation? My eyes move to the rhythm of the beat.

~

Some critics, as I have noticed, are like filthy tides washed with pollution on the shore; the “time, cause and effect” go unparalleled, and the sea anemones are like great encounters with kindred spirits. You cannot contradict a fingerprint. Our bodies are traced, are “given” to us, rapt with rhythm like a train. Groucho Marx: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” I am furthering my activity of Observation [from an evening several days ago]: There is a man walking down the street wearing a bright yellow jacket on a cold, grey day, pops out at me. Large banana-thing walking with a purpose; cell-phone in hand (naturally), Big Bird-ish. This is like one enormous quantity without a plot, but isn’t everything a plot? Memoirs of thought; eluding the written journal and settling for the computer’s wordpad. Another man riding on a leaf-blowing machine, bundled up so much that he looks like a ninja. What can match the voice of a beautifully-written letter? Waking in a sweat.

People always say, “I’m trying to make a difference in the world; trying to change something for the better.” But, are you really? People want to have control of the things of this world, to make a difference, to change things, but how can this be the case when one cannot even change oneself? The only true thing that we have control over is ourselves. This is the most important thing.

~

Elizabeth Treadwell: “the philosophical potion of / the basic understood experimental” . . . and my fave: “how long ago a girl has been / cut out of the advertisement”

~

When I get to be an older man, perhaps in my sixtees, I am most likely to resemble Loren Eiseley.

There should be less hope put into statues and public figures. The statue begins to decay. The internet is chewable. Focus on abstractions; those that do not break the enchantments, like dangling fluconazole over a mushroom. Be a guiding light, be ironic but honorable, be yourself. Be the ellipsis. My next project will consist of gluing sand onto a tiny white canvas. I shall call it a photograph and let it be . . . something to be carried beyond. Each Adagio that I hear is like a great roaring glow within my heart; permalinked and glossy; fingered up, reprint me as I peel off the walls of this room, certainly the plumbing should be viewable, like hidden beauty, like a bright horse disappearing into a sunset. Inexplicit feelings, always. My face shades the entire sidewalk. This is how it was one afternoon as I walked along, the sun above my head seemingly slipping words into my skull through an invisible tube made out of wormhole residue. The clouds, grey, thick as a Slavic accent. The upward tongue; imagine the cowlick. This is the sun, behind the overcast, or a deleted scene from a dream.

(“There is ambition, there is pride, there you find self-seeking, and often, again, it is a question of mere constitutional numbness, of torpor; there are beings who have no urges.”)—Some people are soured beneath breath and the knotted-heart unravels, leaving trails of fallen stars; a wounded elixir. Natural born fact Jack. Right smack dab. If I could merely squeeze the horizon together, forced to a tunnel, would this be where Method begins? Or is this purely Imagination of habit, calenders remaining calm? Somehow, bringing to mind selections from Rimbaud's Alchimie du verbe:

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the naïve rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

I got used to elementary hallucination: I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corps of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters and mysteries; a vaudeville’s title filled me with awe.

Play it again, Sam.

. . .

Once more, I flee.

Painting by Rosson Crow