The universe was not born from any linty Vishnu navel or cosmic concubine womb, not from dusky walnuts or dewed forest tips, of ovarian pools or cool cooing song of hyperallergic tricksters finger fluting the soft clay soils of the moon, not of cheese or bees or plush flowered wings melting their wax upon the iron boulders of amber caked deserts, and not even from the mirrored emerald intestines of the great ocean before the time of terrestrial fates when it hugged and moistened the soils like an early morning blanket still humming the mourning song of that first quaking bounce that initiated the motion of the parallax midnight shoal, oh sea of coal, trolling the astral umbilical like a bastard orphan creature with no name for not having ever yet been made. No, the universe is no stardust marmalade spread over our toasty morass like steamy thick butter-balmed breaking fast waves of solar complexion, as though there were a face up there fading the flames of godly altars out across a lesser atmosphere of measly human riddles and Olympian games. No, the universe was not begun by the plucking of an affirmative string tuned to Pythagorean chords or Schoenbergian sores or greater or lesser intervals, idealized parables, thunder drums bursting skies with life frothing rain grains or lightning tongues talking the hymns of etheric doubles springing somersaults over amoebic jello jiggling in some protozoan dawn before the bell tolls for god only knows. No, the universe is no verse of nonesuch sanctimonious chorus, no terse thread sewn stich pulled from toes holding taut a tenuous linear torch, no head strong itch twitching curses at incessant boulders churning down abominable mountains formed of demiurges piled upon dialogues incanting excesses of pleasure, pain, or pulchritudinous plentitude. The universe was no negative, nor was it a purely purled positive, but more than likely and almost possibly maybe some less than whole and very much quasi quandary of yesses, dried figs, and sundry. Namely, it is yes, by which we may claim it to be an eye, or any yes spelled another way: an I which is eyeing itself I'ing its eyes in awe of the void receding not to blackness but self-same likenesses, in all likelihood seen as a hole of a fine sliced wholeness, or bread, dished hot pie of saccharine somnambulists awakened by the mirror-portal seeking its own tailing hiss of beginning. The universe is an eye through which we see ourselves salivating, a shelf which holds our I's and keeps id's from slipping, a multisyllabic multi-tendriled super-organism that touches all peripheries of electrical cross fires through composite peepers and morphogenetic clouds of sweet ripe vision. The universe is an eye, but not mine, an I but not time, perhaps shy but not blind, a simple rhyming structure humming its own tune so that folks can understand. The earth is a grape turned raisin, the universe is a black pupil: its a hole with the world inside of it and the "it" is just a single side of one possible "us" so forget about insides and outsides and remember to remember that the world is in me and I am in the world, the teeth are the visible bone in a head-holding-mind of verbal songs, and even the color is but a name for the null which defines explaining save for articulating the periphery of our dim knowing.

Sit and meditate on the sound at the end of the thread, and try harder to feel that which cannot be bent through bones or sanded by brittle intonation. It has already been falsely tagged as a ticket rather than ride: its not being ridden but archived. Scientists seem to specialize in death; even the monk on the mountain with his two stones which will never be mirrors continues to create friction for the frustrated followers swimming in sand, and also to write haikus to twilight psyche, and bake buns for holy bovine while neglecting that primary meat of the body. The humble people in the village of rivers and waterwheels lay down flowers upon the sun bathed stones marking the beginnings and endings of all possible trails to remind passersby of the inevitability of death so as not to run out of living while there is still rice to be steamed and reeds to tie up notes to the trees in sets of three as thin tinseled talismans to incessant seconds, calcifying minutes, the inertia of the hours, and the amnesia of years, but also wake up to instruments and parade around for a death already arrived as an eternal return, a rejoicing for a life spent in work not worry, winding a delicately crafted rope from attentive soups, poetic colloquialisms, and water clocks. What do we fear in the unweaving of our own garments, how we have so easily forgotten our slicked skin nudity of soft gummed organelles vibrating in the morning mists thickening the jungles of our ancestral biomes, what terror strikes down to the heart with clichéd cleavers and bumbling ballistics whenever that safe little chocolaty center is encroached upon, as though it were our own to protect, as though it were our selves we disconnect, as though the hand retracting back from the fire didn't learn the flavor of searing kisses from billboard circuses and televised revolutions. Let the hand burn, I say, "let's get gooey" so that we may all stop holding it and be free to pick up new curiosa, clamber together a loose goose neck tchotchke carbuncle, or even build a carbon table that might support the weight and girth of more pertinent conferences on the subject of mind and body, sight and universe, yours or mine, or tables.

Suddenly, appearing out of nothing, or at least seeming to do so, a voice speaks, as though swirling up from the inside: "Ok here you are - or something is - or at least was - that can be said for certain - or at least might be - so you are - not certain but listening - not here but hearing - not have been but being in - a form of you which may or may not be but most certainly was or will be - so... how can I help you?"

And in reply this being which is me but cannot be - since I am the narrator of this story and you the ears in the chairs over theres receiving the lesions and lessons with those unrelenting imbricating attentions - hear me when I say that this voice is not mine but probably yours, as mine is in yours, and we are all really just acting-other for each other in any and every exchange anyways. So it says, which is to say that I say, which as we said is just you saying, to this voice which once spoke, which may also have been ourselves squelching, or at least yours, and to whom or towards what we are now teething this clear calm address teeming over the rim like a tidal wave of emoticons flickering soapy slippage in a kitchen sink bathtub:

Well yes, ahem, I see or thought I saw a way or path by which or through I might cross this boundary which seems to have seamed the sides of what once might have been two separate-though-serrated slices, one of meat or muscle or might which my sights sought to fill with feeling like a sock in search for a foot to step with, and the other of something lighter and decidedly more airy which could have been just rhyme or rhythm overheard from some jingle jangle jungle jam-a-long but I suspect was in fact dissected from a close analysis of that supposed space in between these sun-cured sheets of skin and song where I was able to distill a great white something which - once it was oogled - quickly boggled my noodle for laying limp all my Heideggerian strudel, as well as a batch of other phenomenological confectionaries. So, uh, hmm, er, aaah, asso, typ, leksam, like these likeness, the items of like that linger with like kind, the like-to-like licorice lasso laying languid linguistic lasagna lashing limp-dick tarot on the yawning tantric yoni - this thing which is no thing, an event that happens to us and by us and emanates from us to this other which is becoming, in a process of becoming, increasingly difficult to differentiate, this non-thing pointing me out of the crowd of stimulations constantly consuming and threatening to drown us in simulations, or whatever it is, what is it? When we sit and stare at each other, either through mountain pose or mirror microphones, and exchange this juicy stuff in between that makes us fall into love or fall into the other or fall into or out of ourselves, this jelly slithering from the eyes or projected like beams from my I to yours, is it a detection of touch or a deflection of your visual will, a power or a force or a tactile hallucination which is no less real for being impossible to quantify? Let's qualify it! And then let's distill the essences down, down deep, seep it into a sponge and soak up the flavors to still this more whimsical sacrosanct nature a little longer, oh please please just a little longer, and to save it to share as more than just a whisper, and recall it on call, on days sunny or gray, to allow us to remember an experience worthy of the efforts of doing, so that we may know it all better and end our search here and now, please!

Call a name, or naming. Let's say its communication, say it go ahead, but keep walking next to me for even the lonely shackled and blind need to keep on keeping company. We can pick it up at a passing, swish it back and forth like carbohydrates, at a site active in its taking of a place, in the mouth perhaps, but less sweet and in fact often bitter and with more bite, the more so when less understood, but oh so caramelized delightful when synchronicities collide. There are many languages living in the world and even more coughing draught or churning curds from neglected syntax, so they say, and even more subtle little nuances that pass through pores or across pupils or stewed in subterfuge evading our attempts to elaborate them, and it is all these nameless shivers and slivers that connect the one to their own, and one to each other one also. Its an additive process defying all numerical constraints: this is not algebra but allegory! Listen to the sheepherders whistling over the mountains! Its not to their flock that they speak but the bowing boughs of basalt basilica stretching over the golden fleece, hugging the mythological wet woolen lunchsacks tight with fresh greens's for the cheeses, the epistemological tomb keepers of nature's own gnarled semiotic stacks pushing up from the magnetic streams aligning all of our senses: without these monstrous iron stupas we would have no rubric for intelligibility as all would be of unsounding mineral. The mountain is the first friend, the closest body to mind not our own, the primary primordial immortal provider whose copper clad conduits flow with the same iron vitamins stinging our own over-televised flesh jackets. The mountain is a friend, and in these times we could all use one, in time we will all need one, yet time and time again they will pass away to that musty clay cairn marking the center so that one can always find their way back to the source, the true navel of the only earthen pot worth spinning, that axis mundi which aligns our spines to the stars with stripes of magnetic comet tail mercury dew trickling down over the forehead more abundant and eternal than Icelandic waterfalls in springtime. Its towards these mile high mole hills that we should all address our concerns, against their brickhouse walls that we might strap up our loose tangents and hang the last sad hat to dust unneeded for no other party to promenade or banquet to banter. Tap in the hook and be done with sour airs.

The road to purgatory is paved with good attention; be wary of the tricks and trips carelessly laid upon your inquisition of halfwits, plebs, and secretaries of the burning republics. A good rule of thumbed nose is scrawled on the urns of a baroque penumbra that can never be broken; so what's the difference between riddle and Ritalin in the hands of a remunerated post-pubescent with a cashed in sugar cache and perfectly pitched retinal coordination but no pineal gland phosphors to phone home with? Its no matter, but everything matters, so let's pick it back up again. Let's say being lost in mind beats the hearts wandering bard better than a sea sick sailor in love with a tumultuous sea, called somber sober or Cincinnati: both just delay the inevitable decay of mental enamels rooted in convictions of fallacious wheat paste scrims erected by gray-suited orators of ashen pasts, more good intentions percolating salty lime dust to fill all cracks of a future generation deemed dirty under the nails before exiting the womb through the giftshop - as all those ol' sick daddies liked to call it in those days. Sweep it under the rug during communion so the pale physical compositions of our proudly impersonal conversations may satiated our dead leg gallivanting, while the philosophical house wives sewing circle circulates faux crossword pictographs covering up the clandestine stratagems for inheriting the world and getting to some real tidying up, with earthen spices, respiratory oracles, faint vestibules, and a sensitive zest for divination. Forget this beat, its been beaten bloody already and I've never even really seen any real spill. Let the philanthropists attend to the body count so we can return our attention back upon intention itself, get dirty with fundamental delusions away from grandeur and back upon that primitive flesh tube sponge, nails and all. Orate this oracle of an opera for no future but that which we shall be active in making, we true romantics reconstituting the sweaty terrestrial salts of poetic plethora, masticators of the myriad minutiae, torch wavers of the phantasmagoric miasma, writers of true love poetry and breakers of false heart vases venting profane kitsch and carcinogenic cliché.

I stand before you, esteemed members of the party, as one of the same body, also with my own ((body)) teeming with dendritic strains, buckled up leather slapped constraining braces, bearing the same weight, baring the flaming foam viruses always threatening encroachment upon the colloquial larynx and stopping the jaws from rattling. I stand here now with an erect head and drooping shoulders to show you my singular humility teetering humdrum pride, though my coat is checked at the door, which we all helped build, and me knees are still quivering with the anticipation of asphyxiation like finely tuned motor skills, spilling nails, cat tails, and other esoterica over the garage floor in search for a light. I stand before the forerunners of an apocalypse which needs no introduction, flying low under an ominous horizon of purple paralogical prisms, golden haloed infusorial hays, waxed wings breaking brittle in the cold, and boy are my arms tired. Head hung low, sea swelling ever weaker undertow, a scintillation of the toes swollen up from a deep bow, bowing the chords of the spine in pentatonic sequence programmed by fired Reiki fingers molesting the cartilage, filing down digit acrylics, stirring aromatic ambergris into the socialist neti pots to serigraph the networks net worth - cash in or be cached. The head now hangs even lower as I slump to catch the nasal drip, bent awkward petrified stalagmite neck, "break off" and let me swivel back around circular with no compass, heading by nose towards olfactoral memories, reveries, primrose pastries, dabbed lightly with rosehip oil and geranium mist, blotted with silk, muddled myrrh milkshake elixir grinding granulations of nutmeg into more practical analgesics. My sore shoulders reflect the burden of the empire, of reading old books in poor postures, of ergonomics published for an idealized gallery rather than the disheveled living room we all wake up in and will all return to for the afternoon nap, rapping fingers on unforgiving tabletops, overstuffed knapsacks mottled with soiled handkerchiefs and mucus membrane memory wrinkles, bound at the wrists to untied a knotted tongue, no song left to lisp or lip-synch but "release" or a low fidelity remix of "catatonia" by an anonymous maestro.

In the morning I raise up, first from sleep, then with lids, thrown over quilts to the dawning down, flipping up window scrolls and mental shutters, levitating over the body floating tributaries of an oceanic bedroll, balancing between some quickly clearing cavalcade of awareness and this other space of dreams which I struggle to make any less clear thought its decidedly more cacophonous. I clamor up and over the edge to make contact on with the floor, feeling through my neurotransmitters the sedimentary sentiments of years of human touch saturating the pulpy rings rippling through the floor boards, hands laying mortar upon handshake contracts, conversations encapsulated in tiered layer cakes of linoleum, linseed oil, imported concrete, Columbian coffee and Peruvian rubber, Honduran hemp burlap still ripe with the domestic golden Inca potatoes they were entrusted to wrap up, trapped in the knots of the bastard pine boards, pulsating through Pergo and perforated plastic sheathing, percolating through the cork to the palm of my feet, electrical shocks shimmying up the knees and thighs, sparks to the genitals :: voltage to the kundalini, foaming the head to that perfect sensitive simmer, aligned for thought, open flood gate of words and images and alien dance moves laying out the trajectories of mental geometry. In the morning I have no memory of death for being far too occupied with the beginning of living, a rebirth, still birthed, active in giving birth to the words evaporating over a smooth glassy waterfall of sensations, neglectful of shadows and sour grapes. As I rise to meet the sun I stop to single out those most savory scintillating strings from the molecular morass and cast out a meditation to the scene of day, stirring my own marmalade mind into a thickening of the halcyon buttresses pouring in through the warbled window panes, imprinting an infinite expanse into a memorable meme or palm-sized haiku to take with me through the course of the coming currents so that I might not forget to remember to remember when things are lighter, and to always be attentive to welcoming the eternal return.

Far after lunch, in the evening I die. I die slowly and many times over, minutes ripping themselves out of time with a deafening crunch like devilish knäckebröd chompers through a Tibetan horn. As the black approaches all the quartz architectures collapse upon the sand collecting itself into iced purple irradiated slabs, squeezing ghostly moans from some distant ionic trumpet, skipping diamond tipped edges over all my gold leafed iconography with greasy latex hands bearing an excess of fingers, caked in soot, powdered in noxious potash, poisoning the wellspring of what was once sweet clear pools, left to simmer away upon the iron heat of boiling night. In the evening I revert to the state of a deaf dumb animal - not absolute animality mind you, nothing so pure or innocent - a bastardized hydra-headed homunculus hissing acidic sprays from brimstone vortices on the forehead, skin melting to an internal blue flame, no taste save for that which festers and fancies inebriated fecundity. At day's breaking I become an animal-brute, drunk on anxiety and made numb to all but the hum of neurological tapeworms chewing through my withering prune cup cogito, a berserker with no strength and a taste for blood, a sexual vampire and perverted pariah, self-exiled to a desert of deleterious gases with snarl for smile, and no metronome. In the night I lose sight of what I once was as the accumulated presences of the day concentrate into an impermeable igneous glacial slab smeared over my little self, the minute self stripped quivering stark and mad in the labyrinthine recesses of the dank cerebral catacombs. At night, as I wander, I may sometimes be found without seeking, if I can muster the motivation to remember another amalgamation of a self wherein I may pour my perplexity back into the mold, to remember remembrances too hastily passed over without grasping, remember the song of the hours tempered to the celestial clavier, and if I am rigorous in my own unraveling may even be able to squeak out a melody of memory potent enough to instigate a release from the stupor and set back into place, at harmonic intervals, the fretted frameworks from which the quaking ochre-dyed cognizance may again circulate clarity, crystalline conviction, resume a pose of authority over the waning awareness, and set the feet back upon the base.

As I write the words they inscribe upon the brand of the brain a discrete bio-electrolysis; I work upon syntax, structure slippery syllogisms into straight line structures which seem to need a bending in any other direction while also being held to a form whittled into their own logic, much as my own double helix weaves an alphabetic rubric-riddle into the Mandelbrot digits pumping out the keyed type of the QWERTY board into predictable syncopations while also betraying a knowledge of turning beyond the scope of mathematical computation. The words jump off the page into my mind, spinning sticky woven webs of associations dipped in the sounds and smells of so many lives that distinguishing between those which I have lived, those which I've read, and those that I am currently performing seems not only impossible but negligent to the potential poetic profundity of living at all. Life is not language but informs it, the words jumping like wormy beans in the ontological cantina tapping tempos into the semiotic edifice, gentle indentations tick-tocking clicking clacking calculators circulating meaning from a voice made present inside the murky marshes of the mind, beamed out through the kino back upon the book active in broadcasting: reading is an exchange, a potent magic that steals from the eye while offering sweet wine plums ripened by the morning sun and dried through the long roaring night stoves. Words, consonants pushing back upon the vowels howling multi-timbred octaves above the sense they distract, a eternal sparring between light and dark meats of the same animal, an aikido of articulation, accentuation, or ascension, though one can never be too sure. It all began with a word: in the beginning was the word and the word was god but not literally, not by that name, nor Yahweh or Jehovah or any other, but almost certainly (one can never be so certain) the word itself, the primary form of the note, the primordial bread of the baking, a map scrawled over the stars to give them direction as though there were no north before pointing to it, a halo crown around the solar corona sliced by the honed iris stoned in erratic ecstasy at the sight of its own seeing, an eye which delineates the yes and pronounces the tongue to continue on in the speaking, a muscular twitch scratching lines upon the cave which was just minutes before only still stone of some other body not owned. The word is a force, a willpower, that which turns thought into energy, a magnification of electrified gnosis, a recourse to the known from the gooey gray matter between the ears whining so melancholic in its neglect. The word is an element, a mineral more malleable than metals but capable of so much more mechanical applications, whipped into a paste and mixed with the oily residues of sentience to congeal a pigment of chromatic consciousness - only the color chord but not the instrument, and don't forget the maker - a hardened mercurial orb or maybe dodecahedron that spins with such velocity as to still crystal clocks to loosened seconds, a brick red molten furnace of tinned tempers and adamantium affect, oh sinusoidal silica spreading my soliloquy to the sun and all the sibling selves, including my own, how do we work upon each other in perpetual purling hisses kissing the brows of reason with no decadence of sense or sensibilities. These words are not prose so much as autopoietic, a cosmos of self-making, a system of regeneration with no beginning, tangents of tactility excavated by the surveyors of sight itself the particle swarming sea of eyes active in the reading of difference by declaring the spaces between letters with breath, interval, desire, and apophenia: these specific experiences of abnormal significance which fill out the characters and make the mythology buoyant. I've known the name of it ever since I can remember, I've just only now remembered to remember it as an act of writing, of/for the self, of the known drawn lines demarcating the unknowable without difference, as an aria through which I may come to know that which may be unknowable through sight and location, and speak as an opera for any audience which may make time to allow for it, even if only ever in and from my own ears.