Wild Surmise

There’s a knock at the door. My chin begins to boil. The armchair unites in diversion. I open the door. There’s no one there but a throat. The throat wants to know if it can borrow a mouth. And maybe a gender and a pronoun, if I happen to have one I can spare. I give the throat a sack of pronouns and it leaves, hops away like a Mason jar. I close the door. I return to what I was doing, which was pretty much nothing. Doing nothing takes skill. Not anybody can do it.

If I appear to prefer parrots to mountain climbing, it’s only because a hammer is a tricky instrument and two thumbs are better than one. We are our own distortions and must not panic when the truth disentangles itself from a speed bump. This is why the guitar pick is noted for its resilience and must not be confused with a collarbone.

I walk under a ceiling choreographed to resemble a religion and honor the next few minutes with a holiday of my own invention. It involves festive clothing, great physical strength, and a mushroom. This is why I prefer living my life upside down and sounding the waters of consciousness for implications of coral. I ooze into the future and nourish the past with crickets.

What is my destiny? I ask this at a ripe old age. One might say I’ve already fulfilled my destiny, but that would be incorrect. I’m still not sure what my destiny was, or could have been, or should have been, or might’ve been, other than a pluperfect on steroids.

Destiny is a locomotive assembled within. Batteries are not included.

I like to think of destiny as a form of weather, a micro-climate like wallpaper. Weather is full of sensation, like the scintillations of hyperbole. The expanse of my thought can only go so far as Belgium before it turns to dust, but that’s only if I happen to be thinking about Brussels. Otherwise, I’m thinking about the guitar interlude in the Stone’s “It’s All Over Now,” which has no bounds. It’s infinite, like a mouth.

But wait a second, you say, how is a mouth infinite? A mouth is infinite because there is no limit to what it can do. If you have a mouth, you can shoot flames like a blowtorch. You can say anything you want. It doesn’t have to be the truth. The truth is hard like a blade and shines like a blade and cuts like a blade. It’s exciting to say the truth. But difficult. It has all the plausibility of a scruple in a jet propulsion laboratory. Which is to say, no amount of zirconium is going to make things better. Sometimes you just have to let the quatrain ovulate boomerangs. There is faith to consider, and seaweed. The singing of nails is a response to the hammer, not the open laughter of a suitcase.

One might choose to withdraw from the world and communicate with spirits or learn to play a woodwind instrument. I applaud this choice. One can always masturbate from time to time, or push a grievance around the living room like a vacuum cleaner, but one must always return to square one, which is not a square so much as a carbohydrate, a kilowatt of strong emotive power, like a chronic pain, toothache or fractured tibia.

I recommend using a “weathered wood” stain, hand rubbed on, and a light mineral oil sealer for the thorax. Your love for me has got to be real in order for me to tell you just how I feel. You know? Like a hardened criminal on probation. That kind of thing.

There are no guarantees in life, no warranties or refund policies, but there is plenty of jello, and drawings and sketches. Or, if you prefer, you can it call it “freeing the heart.” One must always be on the alert for new skills to serve the still mysterious demands of consciousness. A toughness, a tenacity, and wrought-iron insistence. That is to say old, venerable chemicals never before aired to the thirst for zeros, or plain old consciousness tugging an acetyline poetry out of the good blue air.

I have rapids in me that want to be revealed as banners of goulash. Go figure. I’m blue like an atom. I feel it all over. A flake of wax, or a squirrel on safari during a moment of meaning. Judgment is coral. Destiny is leather. But sugar grants the chrome of ecstasy, and personality the wild surmise of a romance in Shakespeare.