by John Olson
It's Independence Day. But I'm not feeling independent. I'm feeling embarkation. I'm feeling gestation and buttons. I'm feeling definition and tone. I'm feeling offal and sonnets. Great huge sonnets whirling through space. Sonnets made up of fourteen glands and bowls of vapor. Sonnets with heartbeats. Sonnets of pewter. Sonnets that expand into neon and show consciousness slurping the stars. Licking moons. Growing a body like grass. Consciousness is the arena in which independence takes place. I must now mow that thought and make it smell green. I must let that thought blossom in the light of delight. The feeling of fingers is a kind of independence. It hatches into Vermeer. Into pearls and conjectures of light. Into flagstone and Dutch skeletons. Into huge saturations of language. Into camellias and reddish-brown songs of quiet broth. Both fruit and pain are laminations of human experience. Mammalian experience. For the human being is an animal and moves through its adjectives like a semantic whale moves through a sentence of Arctic beauty. And here, ladies and gentleman, we have the Architecture of Deadwood, South Dakota, in which independence reaches a catharsis of rattling dimes and breaks out into the open to honor the icicles of God. This coincides with pillows. And this coincides with little equations of madcap tattoos. Everything results in Rome, sooner or later, and words become skin. Dials of inflammation on the arms of a glass stadium. Nudity teaches us presence. Irritants teach us patience. Cement teaches us endurance. Foxglove teaches us tolerance. Are you feeling independent yet? I'm still not sure. What exactly is meant by independence anyway? Independence from eating? From work? From the inertia of bile? From depression? From anxiety? From despair? I'm dependent on meat. I'm dependent on water. I'm dependent on fire. I'm dependent on direction and grammar. Most of my emotions arise from a situation of pink. Most of my pessimism is accidental. I'm a body, after all, so there isn't much purpose in lugging unnecessary data about with me. One thing is certain: delirium tickles the polymers of eternity. And independence arrives on the back of a centipede. Sparkling like a ravine. Like a fern sucking the sunlight through a grove of redwood. Like dispersal. Like words compounding into thought. Like Nicola Tessla in America. Like a Book of Fluids. Like a book in relation to time. Like a clear sense of independence on Independence Day. And all this together makes a reality. A pouring. A lunge. An enticement toward understanding. A parcel of air. A lung full of air ascending into a sound of tools and French antiques. And all these visions glisten. And all these feelings come alive. And all these tendencies pressure desire into full expression. Fireworks on the water. The behavior of water the smell of water. Boom! Boom! Boom! Words spitting out of the mouths of the fat Jackson Pollock stars. Independence is savage. Eternity sneezing breasts in a milieu of asterisks and spasms of intricate air.
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Explodes off the page
It's like listening to Deep Purple at max volume. and the Jackson Pollock stars.
Love this. :)
"Most of my pessimism is accidental."
***
Please read, page one glancers! This risks it on the holiday, the poetics of volition, what did I do on yesterday's day, called Afghanistan as if cheerfully to the fireworking neighborhood houses. This block of poetic language is a win for liquid process. *
A museum of sense and possibilities. A literary equivalent to extraordinary fireworks.
"Most of my emotions arise from a situation of pink."
"Everything results in Rome, sooner or later, and words become skin."
"And all these visions glisten."
Thank you, John, for writing so well.
*
This is extraordinary. I'm awestruck.*