JOHN OLSON
TRIGGER
I recently watched a YouTube video about Willie Nelson’s guitar, the one he plays at every concert, every studio recording, and probably when he’s just hanging loose at home. The guitar is a Martin N20 nylon-string classical acoustic guitar. Nelson named it Trigger, after Roy Roger’s horse. He bought it in 1969 from Shot Jackson, a Nashville guitarist who repaired and sold guitars from a store near the Grand Ole Opry. The instrument is battered beyond belief. The surface, which consists of Sitka spruce, has been gouged with autographs and chafed and smudged and scratched after having been played solidly for forty-seven years. The frets - ebony from Gabon or Madagascar inset on a mahogany neck - are so worn down they seem more like a suggestions than frets. Beside the sound hole under the bridge is a splintery gash, shaped somewhat like a crescent moon, or mouth, which the constant flick of Nelson’s pick has created as it brushed past the strings. The instrument looks as fragile as the web some errant spider constructed not long ago on the rear view mirror of our car, as if the tap of a finger would turn the instrument to a pile of dust. What holds this guitar together is a mystery, and yet it produces a very pure and mellow sound, a strong sound.
Can an object have a soul? Sometimes, the difference between the organic and the non-organic seems negligible. Nelson has played this guitar so often, and with such loving devotion to the music, that the guitar seems to be endowed with its own soul.
I find a parallel in heat. If I turn the heat up in the room on a cold winter day I luxuriate in it. I feel enveloped by a benevolent energy. I ‘m guessing that has a lot more to do with imagination than actuality, but who, when it comes down to it, can speak with final authority on what is living and sentient energy and what is merely an excitation of molecules? What is dead matter and what is a breathing substance? If matter is ultimately and essentially solidified energy, isn’t it possible that the qualities of that energy are not always those opposite to life?
There’s a frontier which art and poetry and music reveal. We enter a zone where the edges of things blur in distinction and presences make themselves evident in sensation, not as dead matter but living phenomena.
Is that crazy? “I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying / And I’m crazy for loving you.”
I don’t have conversations with the furniture. Matter is static. Life is full of animation. Life is animation. The furniture doesn’t mate and reproduce. Not that I know of anyway. I’ve never seen a bagpipe fall in love with a balalaika, or a table have intercourse with a chair. I know the difference between a living organism and a block of concrete. And yet, it’s difficult not to believe that the music that brings an instrument to life doesn’t, over time, invest it with a certain talismanic energy, or like a splintery mouth in a soundboard of Sitka spruce, enrich out of loss what time has vainly claimed.
THE EYES OF BAUDELAIRE
A pulse is good for the health. So they say. I have a pulse. I often dream of the prairie. It must mean something. The stars help me evolve. They’re humbling. Or so they say. Personally, I find them disconcerting.
We shiver in the cold. The fire is hard to get going. Commas cry for a pause in the sentence but it never comes it just keeps going as the words continue to reproduce. The radio cooks them in a sauce of feverweed and mariposa lilies. It’s a new kind of radio. It operates on apparitions. Galactic noise, ponderosa pine, tragic flaws and scrollwork.
This is how we incite our whispers to rub puddles into glittery decoys.
Water walks through itself. The capillaries in my eyes burst from screaming. The apparitions describe the beginning of a solar eclipse with an arc and a mutinous slave valve.
I don’t know what to say about the guitar in the corner. It belonged to a gypsy. It’s emblazoned with emblems of fire and empire.
There’s a door in my mind that keeps opening and closing. I wish my thinking would make up its mind. I wish my mind would make up its mind.
One day I got old and started popping bubbles. One day sooner or later it happens to everybody. The forehead folds into a toaster and when the bread pops up the eyes tend to close. I would love to be able to resolve into a dew but that just doesn’t happen unless there’s some literature lying around. Fortunately, there’s always some literature lying around.
Here comes some now. A feeling of frosted glass eats the motel stationary and spits a novel out. I’m calling it Seeds in the Dirt.
Or Flowers of Depreciation.
I have a copy of Baudelaire and a keen sensation of being alive. There’s treasure somewhere in the streets of Budapest. Don’t knock the obstacles. They’re important. Just walk around them if need be. They’re not going anywhere. When I hold them close to my body I can feel their pulse. Most of them are covered in hand cream but a few like to display their plumage.
I must remind you that the estuary is boiling and tonight’s bingo game has been cancelled.
Sometimes the future arrives yesterday and yesterday hatches out of a tired eyelid. The clouds pulse with lightning and rain glistens on the prairie grass. A residual emotion stumbles through my blood searching for resolution. I pull on a sweater and assemble a piece of water. Whatever you happen to see swaying and rotating is my interior. It does that whenever the wind is from the north.
Syllables unravel during the meeting. A cloud folds the sky into a molecule and rolls it through an air conditioner. Later we watch it slowly congeal and drip from the bottom. Ovals imply benediction. My shoes are old but the road is older. When your hope is larger than the map the destination must come into question. There are commas for that, and rainbows and aspirin. Things will come clear eventually. They always do. I stand beside my hunger and saddle my tongue. It’s time to get going. I’m going to hang some sensations in the greenhouse and see if they turn saffron. The apples are a mystery. I don’t know what they’re doing here. Is that a good thing? Let’s say yes and light the lamp.
Depth is implicit. Surface is cold and agitated by gossip. I stir a pot of chowder. My shivers make the granite seem singularly old. My clarinet is broken but my cries claw the clouds out of the sky. I polish the oarlocks until they shine. I live in a milieu of bevels and berries. We love the new pavement. There’s a moose in the middle of the street and a pair of green oars in the garage. I like to imitate squeegees. It’s chiefly why I’ve chosen to congeal around this melon and go mingle with the crowd.
Or not.
Sometimes I just sit and think. And sometimes I scour the world for a pair of glowing wings. People ask if I find these metaphors satisfying and I tell them no, of course not. They’re metaphors. Why else would I move downstage retouching my soliloquy with a revived consonantal emphasis?
It’s ultimately the icicles that capture my attention.
The way they drip.
And drip.
Welcome to the north. Welcome to the stepladders and engravings. To the doors opening and closing. The cat on the hearth. Which is gold. And whose eyes shine like the eyes of Baudelaire.
LIFE
Life is an enigma. No one knows what it is, where it comes from, what to do with it. Sleep and reproduction are partial solutions. But what can one do about diphthongs, or feverfew?
Wildcats roam the cotton fields. I find myself in revolt against nearly everything. Where does it come from? This agitation. This beard of hinges. This flow of arms.
There is the sparkle of literature everywhere. It helps. A form of thick syntax rolls toward the end of the sentence and explodes into Weltanschauung.
The earth smells rich. It’s an unmistakable odor. I and the world are two, yet we are one. I can tell. Because the coffee is locally roasted, and if we can suspend thought for a moment we can also provide rides, games and food concessions.
I need new shoes. The soles are getting worn. This is a sign of determination. The transcendentalist’s desire for something more is understandable, but for now, new shoes will fit the bill.
Consider the lilies. Here is where we find spars and mistletoe. I hear someone singing. My head explodes. Hey now, don’t dream it’s over. Even if a stiffened grammar drops dead there’s still a certain feeling in the breeze, the way the cypress leans into the land, distressing the ocean, which really doesn’t give a shit, it’s just there, waves rolling in, smash splash tumble tumble froth shine, then roll out again.
The smell of desire informs us that we must look in the right places for a solution to custard.
The circus taught me how to throw knives. Conversation taught me how to construct graphs and charts. In the end, the most important thing you can do for yourself is finish reading this sentence.
There now: was that so bad?
My book is bleeding. The one over there, bubbling on the coffee table. It’s a book about how to think. It says that thinking is frisky. You know? Like hydroelectricity.
Or plums.
We hammer our denim into instruments of anonymity. Then we walk around. It feels anonymous, like streaks of cirrus sprawling against a Chine blue sky as the glow of dawn attaches itself to the mountains.
What do we mean when we talk of home? My hands left imprints in the carpet after doing push-ups. Home is where the heart is, so they say. Nobody mentions the kidneys, or dialysis machine, or Hillary Clinton grinning at you on a plasma television.
I stand among cans of paint lost in reflection. I imagine the Phantom of the Opera languishing in chiaroscuro behind stage. Someone asks if I found everything I was looking for. I can’t remember what I was looking for. Was it Clipper Ship Blue or Benton Harbor?
I’ve never been very good at math, but that never held me back from creating equations in words, things like fingers and pizza deliveries.
Ever since it was washed, the throw rug in the hallway has had a tendency to bunch up in the middle. It drives me nuts. I just thought I’d mention that before the dead rise and the Age of Reason reaches its final end as a dirty hot dog and a crumpled shako.
Which reminds me. I’d like to tour Belgium one day.
I walk among giants. Keats, Shelley, Ginsberg, Dylan.
Emily Dickinson.
I inhabit poetry like a drummer inhabits drums, the streets of Céret abandoned to moonlight, the local bus steeped in a mythology of its own. I thought of the river, how it quietly it moved. How like a swan it moved through my mind.
The poem on the page is petulant. The smell of sawdust flavors its words. I’m captivated by your interior heaven. A reflection blossoms and is approved by my head, where it seems to live, and garner respect. We believe it’s haunted, my head. It could be. It’s full of ghosts.
Is your reality my reality? Consider the dream of the collar stud. A prodigious stirring shook the cemetery ground. It rained. We dried ourselves by the fire. Have you ever met someone so vaporous you could slide your hand through them?
Life is hard enough without making things more difficult, and yet it is precisely these kinds of judgments made privately and weighed publicly - or weighed privately and made publicly - that gives presumption its sweet taste and heady aroma.
I will sometimes find a daub of red on a daub of blue and feel taut and itchy as if a surge of life were stretched across my willingness to experience life.
And sigh.
Yesterday at our favorite Mexican restaurant there was a fly in the window. I couldn’t hear a word it said. Or even if it said anything. It just seemed focused on the glass. On getting out. On finding release. Welcome. Welcome my friend to Planet Earth.
I wonder about this urge, this desire to put words together. What does it ultimately lead to? I wonder what this activity would feel like if actually made money. Give a big kiss to Missouri. I’ve never been there. That’s one reason I write. Another is that moment in a gift shop when you realize you’re the only one there and you’re just passing time you have no plans to buy anything of the silly items they’ve got on display and self-consciousness sets in, do I look suspicious you wonder, does the clerk think I’m here to shoplift?
The idea that anything can happen is exhilarating. The poem leans toward purple. Prince waiting for a prescription, riding a mountain bike in a Minnesota parking lot. Let’s drop anchor. Let’s take a look at what’s out there. What’s really out there.
The staircase hugs its own shape. Autumn gleefully does its thing. The train goes by. It has purpose. Can I include your dream? Your dream of the train? It’s so sweet, the way you open a jar of strawberry jam. There are many instances in life in which measurement does not apply.
My hammer speaks German. Did I mention that? The highway argues with the landscape. Volcanos spew fire, meteors streak the sky. There are many of us who seek transformation. Nothing happens by itself. I try hard to find meaning in everything. I never met an armchair I didn’t like. Life is a problem solved by fable. Make something up. Tell a story about picking leaves up one by one in the window well. You will know the right story by its trajectory. You will know the grammar of shoes by walking in them.
The poem complains of too much alliteration. The big bearded borborygmic Bolshevik wore a big blue bolo tie. Royal rutilant ruffles remedied the mangy echo. We stood aghast in the bathroom. Bright lights big city lights going to my head. Even the mirror has a pulse.
Wyoming flies out of my mouth. What can I say? I’m attracted to antique stores. Genetics in the heat. I always say, each of my failures is a huge success. Angst is good. Don’t scare it away. Don’t brush it off the table. You’ve got to hold on. Just hold on. Grab something if it helps. Write something down. Make it talk. Make it swim. Make it bleed.
Our knives gleam in the bloom of day. I see the potential of water just by moving the oars. And I move ahead.
TAWNY AGAIN
Limestone provokes an interest in swans. Prodigies of concrete cram my brain. My head itches. The piccolos feed agonies of form. Grapefruit is proof that the moccasins on the hearth are universal. I feel cloudy. I feel kicked and gynecologic. I feel expectant and louche. Life contains ingredients that I can pronounce, although they’re a little gray and mute. They need a spokesperson. Is this why life was created? To provide speech for the speechless? Who was the creator? Who did this? The potato merits attention, as well as bikinis, dimples, shadows and yachts. Coroners are often svelte, but the spirit is vast and soft. The spirit contains nothing garish, nothing exclusive. The spirit contains nothing. Nothing.
At all.
What can be shown cannot be said. It requires two hundred harmonicas to demonstrate the square root of a cricket. The paragraph crushes its own cognition and becomes a machine for thawing emotion. Picture a mime robbing a bank. Enamel does a flamingo. The escalator insinuates a delicatessen. The whole world crackles with hypothesis. The stars push the night into wool. Marie Laurencin does the dishes. Colors surge from solitude. Fantasies engage the towels. Migrations season the kerosene of emotion and caress pounds of murmuring Picasso. The earth is a sensation of calm and consecration.
I feel immediate and pink. We produce our odors with honesty and science. I’m eager to explore what’s behind the canvas. An antique staircase obtains its charm by mutating into a wildcat and flopping on a wrinkled cherry. My nipples fountain igloos. I slide through each sentence feeling connected and step slowly across the flagstones as I approach the Palace of Tears. Cubism is within my reach. I can feel it. Shapes of air tumble into the sails of nearby ships and humor the sky. The Palace of Tears echoes with freshly revealed secrets. Cubism confesses to the evolution of the boardwalk and finds salvation in incongruity. This is a mean old ugly world. But where else can you find Hostess Cupcakes, horses, and introversion?
Snow sometimes enriches our spirits with its calm and beauty, but our dreams are often unsettled by the presence of gray as the fog wanders the streets searching for form and identity. Is that what it wants? Identity? Or am I making this up?
I think I’m making this up.
But maybe not. Maybe it’s making me up.
All that we know for sure is that when night comes, the temperature lowers, the wind chimes grow still, and the stars disappear as the first flake drifts to the ground.
NOSTALGIA
I love nostalgia. I’m a nostalgia junky. Nostalgia becomes a refuge in old age, a place to go for resource and renewal in order to meet the challenges of a time that no longer make sense.
But then I have to remind myself that nostalgia isn’t a place or a time it’s a mood. It’s a feeling. With images attached.
Many of the images have faded over time. One of the strongest is completely inconsequential: I’m listening to a Donovan album and gazing at a ridge of the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. I’m living in Los Gatos, California, and attending San José State. I’ve been married for about a year though during this particular interlude of window-gazing, I’m alone. I’m alone with a window and the Santa Cruz Mountains and Donovan’s angelic voice singing “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” and feeling wonderful, one of the few times in my life I remember feeling that good.
Probably because I was also drinking wine. I loved drinking alone. I was my favorite bar and bartender. Drinking alone was wonderful. I got a lot out of it. It’s how I became an alcoholic. Alcoholism became a vocation from which I eventually retired.
I had to. The hangovers were excruciating. William Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. He was right. Sobriety became my palace of wisdom. Though much of the time it feels drafty and weird.
I miss wine. It’s one of the things I’m waxing nostalgic over.
I miss my youth. That is quintessentially what I’m feeling nostalgic about. Who doesn’t? I mean, come on! Your body is supple and strong, the skin smooth, the eyes clear, the ears alert, the future ahead of you limitless.
Or so it seemed. When you reach 69, you realize down to the marrow of your bone that time is fleeting and cruel.
In the future I’d imagined for myself I was another Richard Brautigan. I was writing imaginative, playful, eccentric prose and selling millions of books from which I derived a comfortable income.
That didn’t happen. I didn’t begin to earnestly submit work for publication until I was in my mid-40s. I don’t like rejection. But if I didn’t start handling rejection, I’d never achieve anything. I got a lot of rejection. It got to a point that I dreaded opening the mailbox. Finding a response from a publisher, feeling that combination of anxiousness and excitement that comes with opening an important letter, then reading the rejection, however courteously framed, was like getting punched in the face.
I did, however, manage to publish a lot. None of it sold enough to make a living. Not nearly.
Nostalgia slices through me exquisitely when I hear a song that was released when I was in my late teens and early twenties. “You’re Gonna Miss Me” by the 13th Floor Elevators. “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles. “Get Off Of My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones. “Pscyhotic Reaction” by the Count Five. “Hey Tambourine Man” by the Byrds.
It was a colorful time. Feelings were intense. Intensity itself became a value. Exultation, delirium and a carnivalesque atmosphere of jubilant freakiness à la Arthur Rimbaud were celebrated. It was often drug-induced. I remember buying some Dexedrine from the drummer of the Count Five and falling in love with the Unseen Power of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” I had a relative, my mother’s cousin, a big man with a walrus mustache who lived in Cupertino and at whose house I stayed for several weeks in the summer of 1966 who worked as an engineer at Lockheed and to relieve stress worked in the garage on building a sports car from the chassis on up to the windshields and steering wheel. I sat in the living room reading about Buddhism and immersions in the transcendent glories of the mind. It was all about consciousness. Raising consciousness. Expanding consciousness. Liberating consciousness. Squeezing alchemies of golden luminosity out of the brain.
Always - ominously, sinisterly - the war in Vietnam and the prospect of getting drafted permeated everything with a poisoning anxiety. It was obvious the war had nothing whatever to do with defending the United States from the threat of communism and everything to do with war profiteering.
And here we are again. Endless War. The more things change the more they remain the same.
How can an ideology be a threat?
It can’t. Ideologies are to be argued and weighed and evaluated and debated. I think of Hugo’s hunchback embodied by Charles Laughton laughing maniacally as he swings back and forth on those giant bells in Notre Dame because he’s discovered romance. Ideas can be more intoxicating than any drug. They’re powerful motivators. But they can also imprison.
Walk anywhere in the city these days and all you see are people in zombie trances staring at smartphone screens. There’s no courtesy. No sense of shared experience. Only in the rock stadiums or political rallies where spectacle arouses the masses.
What happened?
Shit I don’t know. A paradigm shift. Commerce triumphed over spirit. Commodification triumphed over intellect. But I’m still fighting. Still resisting. Here in my own personal underground.
Her name is G, L, O, R, I, A. I’m going to shout it every day. Gloria.
I recently watched a YouTube video about Willie Nelson’s guitar, the one he plays at every concert, every studio recording, and probably when he’s just hanging loose at home. The guitar is a Martin N20 nylon-string classical acoustic guitar. Nelson named it Trigger, after Roy Roger’s horse. He bought it in 1969 from Shot Jackson, a Nashville guitarist who repaired and sold guitars from a store near the Grand Ole Opry. The instrument is battered beyond belief. The surface, which consists of Sitka spruce, has been gouged with autographs and chafed and smudged and scratched after having been played solidly for forty-seven years. The frets - ebony from Gabon or Madagascar inset on a mahogany neck - are so worn down they seem more like a suggestions than frets. Beside the sound hole under the bridge is a splintery gash, shaped somewhat like a crescent moon, or mouth, which the constant flick of Nelson’s pick has created as it brushed past the strings. The instrument looks as fragile as the web some errant spider constructed not long ago on the rear view mirror of our car, as if the tap of a finger would turn the instrument to a pile of dust. What holds this guitar together is a mystery, and yet it produces a very pure and mellow sound, a strong sound.
Can an object have a soul? Sometimes, the difference between the organic and the non-organic seems negligible. Nelson has played this guitar so often, and with such loving devotion to the music, that the guitar seems to be endowed with its own soul.
I find a parallel in heat. If I turn the heat up in the room on a cold winter day I luxuriate in it. I feel enveloped by a benevolent energy. I ‘m guessing that has a lot more to do with imagination than actuality, but who, when it comes down to it, can speak with final authority on what is living and sentient energy and what is merely an excitation of molecules? What is dead matter and what is a breathing substance? If matter is ultimately and essentially solidified energy, isn’t it possible that the qualities of that energy are not always those opposite to life?
There’s a frontier which art and poetry and music reveal. We enter a zone where the edges of things blur in distinction and presences make themselves evident in sensation, not as dead matter but living phenomena.
Is that crazy? “I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying / And I’m crazy for loving you.”
I don’t have conversations with the furniture. Matter is static. Life is full of animation. Life is animation. The furniture doesn’t mate and reproduce. Not that I know of anyway. I’ve never seen a bagpipe fall in love with a balalaika, or a table have intercourse with a chair. I know the difference between a living organism and a block of concrete. And yet, it’s difficult not to believe that the music that brings an instrument to life doesn’t, over time, invest it with a certain talismanic energy, or like a splintery mouth in a soundboard of Sitka spruce, enrich out of loss what time has vainly claimed.
THE EYES OF BAUDELAIRE
A pulse is good for the health. So they say. I have a pulse. I often dream of the prairie. It must mean something. The stars help me evolve. They’re humbling. Or so they say. Personally, I find them disconcerting.
We shiver in the cold. The fire is hard to get going. Commas cry for a pause in the sentence but it never comes it just keeps going as the words continue to reproduce. The radio cooks them in a sauce of feverweed and mariposa lilies. It’s a new kind of radio. It operates on apparitions. Galactic noise, ponderosa pine, tragic flaws and scrollwork.
This is how we incite our whispers to rub puddles into glittery decoys.
Water walks through itself. The capillaries in my eyes burst from screaming. The apparitions describe the beginning of a solar eclipse with an arc and a mutinous slave valve.
I don’t know what to say about the guitar in the corner. It belonged to a gypsy. It’s emblazoned with emblems of fire and empire.
There’s a door in my mind that keeps opening and closing. I wish my thinking would make up its mind. I wish my mind would make up its mind.
One day I got old and started popping bubbles. One day sooner or later it happens to everybody. The forehead folds into a toaster and when the bread pops up the eyes tend to close. I would love to be able to resolve into a dew but that just doesn’t happen unless there’s some literature lying around. Fortunately, there’s always some literature lying around.
Here comes some now. A feeling of frosted glass eats the motel stationary and spits a novel out. I’m calling it Seeds in the Dirt.
Or Flowers of Depreciation.
I have a copy of Baudelaire and a keen sensation of being alive. There’s treasure somewhere in the streets of Budapest. Don’t knock the obstacles. They’re important. Just walk around them if need be. They’re not going anywhere. When I hold them close to my body I can feel their pulse. Most of them are covered in hand cream but a few like to display their plumage.
I must remind you that the estuary is boiling and tonight’s bingo game has been cancelled.
Sometimes the future arrives yesterday and yesterday hatches out of a tired eyelid. The clouds pulse with lightning and rain glistens on the prairie grass. A residual emotion stumbles through my blood searching for resolution. I pull on a sweater and assemble a piece of water. Whatever you happen to see swaying and rotating is my interior. It does that whenever the wind is from the north.
Syllables unravel during the meeting. A cloud folds the sky into a molecule and rolls it through an air conditioner. Later we watch it slowly congeal and drip from the bottom. Ovals imply benediction. My shoes are old but the road is older. When your hope is larger than the map the destination must come into question. There are commas for that, and rainbows and aspirin. Things will come clear eventually. They always do. I stand beside my hunger and saddle my tongue. It’s time to get going. I’m going to hang some sensations in the greenhouse and see if they turn saffron. The apples are a mystery. I don’t know what they’re doing here. Is that a good thing? Let’s say yes and light the lamp.
Depth is implicit. Surface is cold and agitated by gossip. I stir a pot of chowder. My shivers make the granite seem singularly old. My clarinet is broken but my cries claw the clouds out of the sky. I polish the oarlocks until they shine. I live in a milieu of bevels and berries. We love the new pavement. There’s a moose in the middle of the street and a pair of green oars in the garage. I like to imitate squeegees. It’s chiefly why I’ve chosen to congeal around this melon and go mingle with the crowd.
Or not.
Sometimes I just sit and think. And sometimes I scour the world for a pair of glowing wings. People ask if I find these metaphors satisfying and I tell them no, of course not. They’re metaphors. Why else would I move downstage retouching my soliloquy with a revived consonantal emphasis?
It’s ultimately the icicles that capture my attention.
The way they drip.
And drip.
Welcome to the north. Welcome to the stepladders and engravings. To the doors opening and closing. The cat on the hearth. Which is gold. And whose eyes shine like the eyes of Baudelaire.
LIFE
Life is an enigma. No one knows what it is, where it comes from, what to do with it. Sleep and reproduction are partial solutions. But what can one do about diphthongs, or feverfew?
Wildcats roam the cotton fields. I find myself in revolt against nearly everything. Where does it come from? This agitation. This beard of hinges. This flow of arms.
There is the sparkle of literature everywhere. It helps. A form of thick syntax rolls toward the end of the sentence and explodes into Weltanschauung.
The earth smells rich. It’s an unmistakable odor. I and the world are two, yet we are one. I can tell. Because the coffee is locally roasted, and if we can suspend thought for a moment we can also provide rides, games and food concessions.
I need new shoes. The soles are getting worn. This is a sign of determination. The transcendentalist’s desire for something more is understandable, but for now, new shoes will fit the bill.
Consider the lilies. Here is where we find spars and mistletoe. I hear someone singing. My head explodes. Hey now, don’t dream it’s over. Even if a stiffened grammar drops dead there’s still a certain feeling in the breeze, the way the cypress leans into the land, distressing the ocean, which really doesn’t give a shit, it’s just there, waves rolling in, smash splash tumble tumble froth shine, then roll out again.
The smell of desire informs us that we must look in the right places for a solution to custard.
The circus taught me how to throw knives. Conversation taught me how to construct graphs and charts. In the end, the most important thing you can do for yourself is finish reading this sentence.
There now: was that so bad?
My book is bleeding. The one over there, bubbling on the coffee table. It’s a book about how to think. It says that thinking is frisky. You know? Like hydroelectricity.
Or plums.
We hammer our denim into instruments of anonymity. Then we walk around. It feels anonymous, like streaks of cirrus sprawling against a Chine blue sky as the glow of dawn attaches itself to the mountains.
What do we mean when we talk of home? My hands left imprints in the carpet after doing push-ups. Home is where the heart is, so they say. Nobody mentions the kidneys, or dialysis machine, or Hillary Clinton grinning at you on a plasma television.
I stand among cans of paint lost in reflection. I imagine the Phantom of the Opera languishing in chiaroscuro behind stage. Someone asks if I found everything I was looking for. I can’t remember what I was looking for. Was it Clipper Ship Blue or Benton Harbor?
I’ve never been very good at math, but that never held me back from creating equations in words, things like fingers and pizza deliveries.
Ever since it was washed, the throw rug in the hallway has had a tendency to bunch up in the middle. It drives me nuts. I just thought I’d mention that before the dead rise and the Age of Reason reaches its final end as a dirty hot dog and a crumpled shako.
Which reminds me. I’d like to tour Belgium one day.
I walk among giants. Keats, Shelley, Ginsberg, Dylan.
Emily Dickinson.
I inhabit poetry like a drummer inhabits drums, the streets of Céret abandoned to moonlight, the local bus steeped in a mythology of its own. I thought of the river, how it quietly it moved. How like a swan it moved through my mind.
The poem on the page is petulant. The smell of sawdust flavors its words. I’m captivated by your interior heaven. A reflection blossoms and is approved by my head, where it seems to live, and garner respect. We believe it’s haunted, my head. It could be. It’s full of ghosts.
Is your reality my reality? Consider the dream of the collar stud. A prodigious stirring shook the cemetery ground. It rained. We dried ourselves by the fire. Have you ever met someone so vaporous you could slide your hand through them?
Life is hard enough without making things more difficult, and yet it is precisely these kinds of judgments made privately and weighed publicly - or weighed privately and made publicly - that gives presumption its sweet taste and heady aroma.
I will sometimes find a daub of red on a daub of blue and feel taut and itchy as if a surge of life were stretched across my willingness to experience life.
And sigh.
Yesterday at our favorite Mexican restaurant there was a fly in the window. I couldn’t hear a word it said. Or even if it said anything. It just seemed focused on the glass. On getting out. On finding release. Welcome. Welcome my friend to Planet Earth.
I wonder about this urge, this desire to put words together. What does it ultimately lead to? I wonder what this activity would feel like if actually made money. Give a big kiss to Missouri. I’ve never been there. That’s one reason I write. Another is that moment in a gift shop when you realize you’re the only one there and you’re just passing time you have no plans to buy anything of the silly items they’ve got on display and self-consciousness sets in, do I look suspicious you wonder, does the clerk think I’m here to shoplift?
The idea that anything can happen is exhilarating. The poem leans toward purple. Prince waiting for a prescription, riding a mountain bike in a Minnesota parking lot. Let’s drop anchor. Let’s take a look at what’s out there. What’s really out there.
The staircase hugs its own shape. Autumn gleefully does its thing. The train goes by. It has purpose. Can I include your dream? Your dream of the train? It’s so sweet, the way you open a jar of strawberry jam. There are many instances in life in which measurement does not apply.
My hammer speaks German. Did I mention that? The highway argues with the landscape. Volcanos spew fire, meteors streak the sky. There are many of us who seek transformation. Nothing happens by itself. I try hard to find meaning in everything. I never met an armchair I didn’t like. Life is a problem solved by fable. Make something up. Tell a story about picking leaves up one by one in the window well. You will know the right story by its trajectory. You will know the grammar of shoes by walking in them.
The poem complains of too much alliteration. The big bearded borborygmic Bolshevik wore a big blue bolo tie. Royal rutilant ruffles remedied the mangy echo. We stood aghast in the bathroom. Bright lights big city lights going to my head. Even the mirror has a pulse.
Wyoming flies out of my mouth. What can I say? I’m attracted to antique stores. Genetics in the heat. I always say, each of my failures is a huge success. Angst is good. Don’t scare it away. Don’t brush it off the table. You’ve got to hold on. Just hold on. Grab something if it helps. Write something down. Make it talk. Make it swim. Make it bleed.
Our knives gleam in the bloom of day. I see the potential of water just by moving the oars. And I move ahead.
TAWNY AGAIN
Limestone provokes an interest in swans. Prodigies of concrete cram my brain. My head itches. The piccolos feed agonies of form. Grapefruit is proof that the moccasins on the hearth are universal. I feel cloudy. I feel kicked and gynecologic. I feel expectant and louche. Life contains ingredients that I can pronounce, although they’re a little gray and mute. They need a spokesperson. Is this why life was created? To provide speech for the speechless? Who was the creator? Who did this? The potato merits attention, as well as bikinis, dimples, shadows and yachts. Coroners are often svelte, but the spirit is vast and soft. The spirit contains nothing garish, nothing exclusive. The spirit contains nothing. Nothing.
At all.
What can be shown cannot be said. It requires two hundred harmonicas to demonstrate the square root of a cricket. The paragraph crushes its own cognition and becomes a machine for thawing emotion. Picture a mime robbing a bank. Enamel does a flamingo. The escalator insinuates a delicatessen. The whole world crackles with hypothesis. The stars push the night into wool. Marie Laurencin does the dishes. Colors surge from solitude. Fantasies engage the towels. Migrations season the kerosene of emotion and caress pounds of murmuring Picasso. The earth is a sensation of calm and consecration.
I feel immediate and pink. We produce our odors with honesty and science. I’m eager to explore what’s behind the canvas. An antique staircase obtains its charm by mutating into a wildcat and flopping on a wrinkled cherry. My nipples fountain igloos. I slide through each sentence feeling connected and step slowly across the flagstones as I approach the Palace of Tears. Cubism is within my reach. I can feel it. Shapes of air tumble into the sails of nearby ships and humor the sky. The Palace of Tears echoes with freshly revealed secrets. Cubism confesses to the evolution of the boardwalk and finds salvation in incongruity. This is a mean old ugly world. But where else can you find Hostess Cupcakes, horses, and introversion?
Snow sometimes enriches our spirits with its calm and beauty, but our dreams are often unsettled by the presence of gray as the fog wanders the streets searching for form and identity. Is that what it wants? Identity? Or am I making this up?
I think I’m making this up.
But maybe not. Maybe it’s making me up.
All that we know for sure is that when night comes, the temperature lowers, the wind chimes grow still, and the stars disappear as the first flake drifts to the ground.
NOSTALGIA
I love nostalgia. I’m a nostalgia junky. Nostalgia becomes a refuge in old age, a place to go for resource and renewal in order to meet the challenges of a time that no longer make sense.
But then I have to remind myself that nostalgia isn’t a place or a time it’s a mood. It’s a feeling. With images attached.
Many of the images have faded over time. One of the strongest is completely inconsequential: I’m listening to a Donovan album and gazing at a ridge of the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. I’m living in Los Gatos, California, and attending San José State. I’ve been married for about a year though during this particular interlude of window-gazing, I’m alone. I’m alone with a window and the Santa Cruz Mountains and Donovan’s angelic voice singing “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” and feeling wonderful, one of the few times in my life I remember feeling that good.
Probably because I was also drinking wine. I loved drinking alone. I was my favorite bar and bartender. Drinking alone was wonderful. I got a lot out of it. It’s how I became an alcoholic. Alcoholism became a vocation from which I eventually retired.
I had to. The hangovers were excruciating. William Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. He was right. Sobriety became my palace of wisdom. Though much of the time it feels drafty and weird.
I miss wine. It’s one of the things I’m waxing nostalgic over.
I miss my youth. That is quintessentially what I’m feeling nostalgic about. Who doesn’t? I mean, come on! Your body is supple and strong, the skin smooth, the eyes clear, the ears alert, the future ahead of you limitless.
Or so it seemed. When you reach 69, you realize down to the marrow of your bone that time is fleeting and cruel.
In the future I’d imagined for myself I was another Richard Brautigan. I was writing imaginative, playful, eccentric prose and selling millions of books from which I derived a comfortable income.
That didn’t happen. I didn’t begin to earnestly submit work for publication until I was in my mid-40s. I don’t like rejection. But if I didn’t start handling rejection, I’d never achieve anything. I got a lot of rejection. It got to a point that I dreaded opening the mailbox. Finding a response from a publisher, feeling that combination of anxiousness and excitement that comes with opening an important letter, then reading the rejection, however courteously framed, was like getting punched in the face.
I did, however, manage to publish a lot. None of it sold enough to make a living. Not nearly.
Nostalgia slices through me exquisitely when I hear a song that was released when I was in my late teens and early twenties. “You’re Gonna Miss Me” by the 13th Floor Elevators. “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles. “Get Off Of My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones. “Pscyhotic Reaction” by the Count Five. “Hey Tambourine Man” by the Byrds.
It was a colorful time. Feelings were intense. Intensity itself became a value. Exultation, delirium and a carnivalesque atmosphere of jubilant freakiness à la Arthur Rimbaud were celebrated. It was often drug-induced. I remember buying some Dexedrine from the drummer of the Count Five and falling in love with the Unseen Power of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” I had a relative, my mother’s cousin, a big man with a walrus mustache who lived in Cupertino and at whose house I stayed for several weeks in the summer of 1966 who worked as an engineer at Lockheed and to relieve stress worked in the garage on building a sports car from the chassis on up to the windshields and steering wheel. I sat in the living room reading about Buddhism and immersions in the transcendent glories of the mind. It was all about consciousness. Raising consciousness. Expanding consciousness. Liberating consciousness. Squeezing alchemies of golden luminosity out of the brain.
Always - ominously, sinisterly - the war in Vietnam and the prospect of getting drafted permeated everything with a poisoning anxiety. It was obvious the war had nothing whatever to do with defending the United States from the threat of communism and everything to do with war profiteering.
And here we are again. Endless War. The more things change the more they remain the same.
How can an ideology be a threat?
It can’t. Ideologies are to be argued and weighed and evaluated and debated. I think of Hugo’s hunchback embodied by Charles Laughton laughing maniacally as he swings back and forth on those giant bells in Notre Dame because he’s discovered romance. Ideas can be more intoxicating than any drug. They’re powerful motivators. But they can also imprison.
Walk anywhere in the city these days and all you see are people in zombie trances staring at smartphone screens. There’s no courtesy. No sense of shared experience. Only in the rock stadiums or political rallies where spectacle arouses the masses.
What happened?
Shit I don’t know. A paradigm shift. Commerce triumphed over spirit. Commodification triumphed over intellect. But I’m still fighting. Still resisting. Here in my own personal underground.
Her name is G, L, O, R, I, A. I’m going to shout it every day. Gloria.