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I Am Speckles the Clown


by John Olson


My belt buckle includes a cure for birch. It's leather and conciliatory and foliage. I frequent my clothes in the morning and dress them in my body as if reflection on life were ghostly. It is. It is a ghost. It is like the greenery surrounding an airport. I elude it when the crowd sweetens and an emotion tumbles through my ribs in a nimble burning purity.    

I am Speckles the Clown. I act my bohemia vertiginously. I am a bowl of chowder rawhide raw. My ear chats the jug. My legs are emperors of mediation. The ground is my ground. The air is accessory to my notwithstanding. I am a naked pound of autumn. My addictions are subtle and will crash into you if prompted. I start at a penumbra to unravel the sky. I say to the sun: beam into me. I have an England to mirror.   

History is silly. It just is. I fall into its books with itching swollen pounds of postulation. Historically, the clown is a figure of sacred nonsense. I sway my spoons with amber. This occurs in the kitchen, which is inherently silly. What kitchen isn't silly? Kitchens are silly.    

Food is silly. Eating is silly. Yet the camaraderie of sharing a table is not silly. It is sacred. It becomes silly when the jello arrives. Everyone sits stationed at their chair wearing a cap of bells. An aesthetic grammar unbosoms our smacking. You can tell it is aesthetic by the way it flops thinly on the hammerhead and spits.   

Break caustic we tongue. The grapefruit answers by forming a pulley. It creaks, and the words get happening. We are aghast with sandwiches. The exhibit grabs at our need for black and personifies plants.    

Extend oats to your endeavor if it does excerpts. And resembles a horse. It may be a horse. It may be clean and daylight and ruminative and matter. Gaze at your throat behind the blaze. If it trembles with syntax than a sentence is happening. You must hop through it violet and crumpled.    

There is a crab on the beach. It plays at its umpteenth vividness with legs and strength and landscape and sand. The railroad is extra. It just is.    

I embark on a novel. I am like that crab. I am the shovel of the feathers it dreams. My novel gulps assembly. Anything and everything. I think of oil and velvet. They become pounds of gnarly description, a gaudy sag to the nature of words. An abhorrence whistles a smell. Fireworks boil a headlight. Hammer on, dear Nothingness, I say, hammer on.    

There is a resource that explains these things with equity and throats. I shout walking and demonstrate it by glass. I build a fence, since digging is indigo. This will be a chapter in my novel. I use a tablespoon to dig the potholes. There are roots. I work the spoon through the roots. The neighbor recommends that I use a pothole digger, and have children. He does not know I am a clown, and sometimes require the use of codeine.   

Crack, hear my plea. I say, go away neighbor. The neighbor goes away.    

I rip the heat into pink. I can do these things because there are words to convey these events. There are propane and gasoline, and waves and dancing. Heft explodes the drum. Heft and sticks. I talk my fork into being in my book. This is it: my fork. It signifies fork. And napkins. Harnesses and horses are themselves. They tell the helter-skelter world that they are malleable, and like clowns. That is to say words expand into bedlam, and lose control in their own necessity.

 

 

 

 

 

                                               

 

 

 

                                               

 

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