A long morning yawns its mallow yellow yawn out there on the grass where the trees and the heart live, out there where the mad heat melts the orgy moon and capsizing starships. It was a day where I felt my guts reeling in agony and worry. I had been at the hip girl’s room and holding her in the sheets while she fell asleep to the baa baa of the sheep dream king.

And I rise up to make the world uncomfortable, I rise up to make the sane seem insane. I make candles and wax them, I bathe babies and attach them to mothers, I rain God a Zippo, strike fire to the fear of the streets, the piccadilly rhombus all nonsense… Like gravy in a gravity-free orbital freefall.

A heartbeat knocks at the door, a witch rises up through the floor, mad Cigarette Sally on her haunches bellowing Bible songs, fellow longs, golden gongs, monks pray to bluebirds in the clouds, aloud, all around. Peace and tranquility for the turtles, the myrtle creeps, someone pens a letter to a lemon. A lemon has its rind broken.

He looks at her lips in the golden break of afternoon day and he thinks of all the words she forms and the ideas she has and all the good heartfelt notions and the crazy thoughts that make her so special.

A tight piece of comatose ass rested in the closet of his mind. She was in dark green work pants and a black top—short-sleeved and revealing the pale softness of her arms—and her wavy cornsilk hair was wet and dangling like restlessness. 

 And here I am, a scattering of thoughts, a pyramid of jingles and jangles all up in this red head of mine. I eat blueberry pie on medicine street and the medicine man says I have a million miles of corded, tangled thoughts and he just don’t have a cure, man, ‘cept listen to some ambient cyberpunk stream, sit by a real stream, dream, languid row oars on the river Middle Time, think of high grasses wavering in the breeze of another sun and soak, another moon and dive, another starlight far right gong show, the amber ass clown in cuffs. Justice for dessert lies vivid in the sun beneath the lid of a cake holder, key holder, bra holder… Get ready to bend over and get it like you’ve given it.

Milk and minstrels flow down Nickel Lane as the barbarians wait on the hill, flags of war unfurled, girls of prey uncurled, thoughts all in a bucket, sometimes just say ‘fuck it’ and the eyes bounce this way and that way… A cold creek makes a menacing sound at high noon. Meditation insists peace. The hounds of dawn wake the world, a skunk and her two little skunklings waltz up the road where we live. It’s a warm day full of sun and green. I can’t seem to lean into something that isn’t mass unfocus and restlessness.

I went to Athens and wandered through the ruins and listened to the stark larks whispering their songs in the olive trees. I shuffled through the bustling streets, the heavy air, the smell of strange food burned in my face. “I need experiences if I’m ever going to be any good,” I thought aloud to an ancient wall. I turned to look at the details in the sunbeam. I went to the plaza with the big black box and the turning tide of people. There was a man made of rope and he was dressed in black and red. He was waving his arms in the air and chanting some ancient chant of the sea. I looked up to a hotel window and saw a lamp burning. I thought of soft furniture and peace and liquid drink of the mesmerizing type. I thought of creating my own periodical and I would call it The Vespertine Lamp… Despite the sun.

I went into the hotel lobby and ordered up a room. I wanted something dim and cool and with a view of the plaza or the Saronic Gulf. I got checked in and made my way through the lingering tourist crowds and up to my room. I clicked on the jibber jabber box and went to take a shower. The soap smelled like salt and clean men from the sea. Afterward I wanted to tilt and so loaded a bowl with some high-grade Colorado herb and smoked. It’s so strange to be so high in such a foreign and grandiose place. Nothing is familiar, there is no reference point for anything. “Oh, yes this. Oh, yes that.” None twat for a measure. Hypodermic consciousness, laughing gas, permanent waves of perception now twisted like taffy. I went to look out the window and I felt as if I were on another planet, not some cumbersome rock in the Milky, but some far away place, far from the missteps of man, far from the land of aching hearts and unpolished souls, far from the meandering senseless megalithic maniacs and their war machines.

“We do not kill each other here,” someone in the room whispered, but no one was there.

I went to recline in the bed and read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow until I grew sleepy. I got back up to look out the window and this time it was night. The stars roared overhead like liquid electric bastard lanterns. I bucked my hips and impregnated the galaxy. I bid farewell to the world and curled up beneath the satin sheets and slept long and coldly, the dreams coming like liquid flashes, the long dawn waiting on the precipice.

END

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