PDF

The Sunlight of the Mind


by John Olson


Believe me when I say art is powerfully stiffened by olives, the chopped intentions of the poetry anthology, the literal significance of any boat stew cooked into literature. This is where I nudge the meaning of the eyeball home to its skull. It would be a labor to suggest that sugar is involved. But it is. Sugar sprints to my elbows and jumps into the chemistry of my oaths. I swear at everything, swear to everything, swear about everything. I mean, what else can you do with existence but live it? Wear it? Fly it around the room pleading for understanding? This is how things are. Lobsters become postmarks. Participles flavor abstraction with the boiling scenery of the mind. Let us ruminate on the reality of clothing. It gets cold here on earth. I see a Viking wandering around Norway with a flashlight. I see the breath of the deer. I can feel a nude woman squeezing a sponge against her leg. The flop and flap of a sentence liberates the spirit of malleability. Simulacrums that contain stillborn operas, ancient dilations, the congeniality of significance falling over itself. My forehead is ready for the trumpets in books. Let's explore consciousness, shall we? Put on a hat of quarks. Ride palominos. Swerve into thought like a lunatic caboose. Let me offer you the smell of a splendid worry, the deification of trout, the music of pain. There is providence in the fall of a sparrow and dissonance in the rain. The secrets of the heart get splattered on the driveway gravel. Syllables abound for the puzzles of sound. Bulbs and neckties and process are everywhere, delicate as paths. The death of a hair floats in the air. There is the hint of a sexual squeeze. The leaning of a lazy breeze. Definitions unravel. Solitude swallows the ripples of time. The nerves are birds that guide us to feeling the loop and lift of reverie. That's where the treasure is. The shine of acceleration. The sunlight of the mind.  

Endcap