Morn Shakespeare
“But at last
the quiet water of the night shall rise,
And our skin
shall see far away, as it does under water.”
-Robert Bly
Woke up Horny. This is normal. Just another phantasmal dream waxing brightly into late autumnal light and the kind of bite to the air that proves without a doubt that winter is no longer just a concept but in fact as imminent as another day, which it, now, is. Quick. Get dressed. You're running out of time to craft the kind of life you always hoped you’d live.
There are things you hear, like the sing-song screech of the brake lines on a garbage truck, then the throaty rumble when it really comes around to your bite of the block. The pluck of a guitar just barely in tune. The roar of a crowd from outside a church or a stadium, or a theatre. I miss crowds. There's a thin flying insect in the window screen. Lost, lost. A pedal steel droning oriental style over the hi-fi. You can consider your options for minutes, hours, days, or years, but you're not getting any younger.
Woke up Horny. This is the animal way. Plants with thin sharp pointed leaves prepare for the oncoming tsunami of global warming with an entirely unadvantageous adaptation. What are you going to do, there in the south-facing window, prick and stab climate change to death? We want the impermanent to be permanent, the bread not to perish in the plastic wrapper, the earth never to spoil, the seas never to boil. All words reduced to primal vowels, with the lights off, all proportions manifest a kind of fricative ecstasy. The Good Life is a constructed house of cards, cards made of thick waxed paper and blown away at the slightest blow, a neighbor come to the door to ask if the kids can come out and play. Sashay.
Woke up Horny. This is natural. One of the many forces and forms, rippling appelations of energy and matter, the sting and the welt. My hands are folded together, the clock ticks on the wall, the thermometer takes the temperature of the room inertly, the dog bounces and wines, it's snow, falling. Willa Cather refused to write prefaces to her books. Wordsworth wandered the wetmoorlands because, as eerie as exile is, it is offset by return, or at least the possibility of a return. See what he meant was “everything we consume infiltrates our psyche.” Precarious, sanity. Name six brands of Australian barbecue sauce and win a prize behind door number three. With historical imagination replaced by digital textual exegesis, we stare off into the murdered middle distance and receive messages, U Up? and other subtle discourses and philosophical scrutinies. Don't be rash.
She had two bucks and I had a five so we bought two tall boys at the Seven Eleven and a got the boy to slip me a packet of Camel Blue to split out in the Bronco. Don't smoke in the car, cept when it's cold, 's the rule, with all our stuff that didn't get lost in that friggn storage unit sitting in garbage bags under the dome in the back. The fingers of dawn meddling in on the moody night's domain around the tan room in the tan house in a tan town where we hunker. Woke up horny but this is not unusual in the slightest. In fact, I'll do it again tomorrow. Fuck.
Geographical sensitivity is interwoven into our DNA, spatial awareness ain't sophistication, it's colloquialism.
Woke up horny. The old bird powering up with his head to take a peek out of the nest, swooping swiftly swish swoosh swash through the valley still dewkissed and garish. How hard his beak, how weak the worm, later. Old Paul Simon's Slip Sliding Away as a cosmological constant. Thumb through this thronged whiporwhill life long enough and you'll see the lush scenes of jungles foliage up meltiulous, drawn in recurring recumbant hand by our jesting animator/creator and just as quickly you'll find that you have missed just about everything. Animated creator (did he just use foliage as a verb? It's foliate, right?)
Those thousand old women placating in mirth and marveling at the shapes that life takes, lives take: "have you seen where I put my-- nevermind" whose contemporaries pass away. In the aftermath of their demise, we summon up memories not just to give shape to their lives, but also to better understand our own. The moments that take prominence in our memories are those that are linked to our self-concept, our ur-story. Hungering for her company. Pining and smiling. Do I ever cross your mind? A very specific and hoary daydream regarding the heft of her breastbone naggingly forgotten. I thought of her arms, her nose, it was, truth be told, unconventional. Tastes are fickle like that, like desire, like my sense of humor, not for everyone. An evolutionary safegaurd. Not it!
Woke up horny. This is sanctioned. Like the king's mirror, Canaan's own sea, the Sasu of Yhw enclave, the Empire of Doubt. Regarding the raw news in the paper Dad said, the sun comes up and the sun goes down. He found a shady grove free from the skies pregnant with possibilities and went away there. Waking up horny in this little ill-gotten umiverse is a kind of confirmation. Here in the season of sulpherine quiet, the real deep drink life begs at the fringes of its retinue. There's a blue cave beneath the sea of pain that encircles some distant moon, with methane dripping off the stalagmites, and ungainly alien creatures lurching around, their nervous systems entirely wrapped around their digestive tracts, no skin, and their fumbling brutality is a kind of Hidalgan shrugging, what? You expected the lords zeal? Eat up, it's cold and our Lord is generous, tell us a nostalgic story.
Woke up horny. This is it. My suspicion is that I am not myself, that I am the small voice of a tall man who is the fullest possible consciousness remaining calm and silent while I rage and charge through my feelings and life. Show tranquil compassion to those I have wronged or by whom I have been wronged , and hope you will stand tall still when I am gone.