I cannot escape the stranglehold of words. To be able to use language like an alchemist mixing chemical concoctions that play with the mind, well now that just turns me on to no end. Words are sexy. I’ve been learning about the sentence and even though I have been writing sentences for more than forty years, there’s still loads to learn.

And then there are American Sentences – the Americanized form of the Haiku invented by the word wizard, Allen Ginsberg. Like the Haiku, American Sentences (example 1 and example 2 and here’s a whole book of them) are meant to be extremely vivid and detailed oriented with the image as the central focus rather than rhetoric or lyricism. I tend to float between image and lyricism.

I especially love what happens between sentences where the juxtaposition of images play with your own experiences to co-create a narrative between writer and reader. For example, when you read the verse below what images spring forth from the depths of your subconscious:

Where were you when the weird bearded beasts
burst from her womb rubbing their buddha bellies and
praying to the sleeping lamb, the flowering whore laughed
and blessed the night; your last words lost in the drowning city.

Those are the kind of words I hear in my head from time to time and often commit to paper (well electronic paper that is). I know I’m sloppy with punctuation, but playing with words is more meaningful to me than grammar. Though grammar is the glue that makes the spells work. Otherwise, you (mis)spell and the magic doesn’t work. And words are magic.

Bring me back the witch’s head. I’ve been obsessing over Courtney Love obsessing over doll parts and faking beyond fake with a crazy ache to have more cake than anybody else at the table.  But the truth is I’m more likely to be what might have been bearing the name of never was.  I don’t know what I’m selling but I’m not selling sheep. Demonology maybe?

Sometimes my mind gets so saturated with words that it feels like my head is going to explode. Like right now, my head is throbbing but it’s not like a headache. It’s more like all the thoughts in my head want to get out at once, and yet I’m still putting stuff in it right now as I  re-read T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland – probably his most famous poem, but hasn’t been, up until now, one of my favorites. The state my mind is in is making the Wasteland make sense like it’s never done for me before. 

When I’m here, there’s not much else to do but ride it out and wait for the calm to come.

It’s a good place this.

I like it here
this place where
all of Time meets
inside my head
past, present, future
blending together into
now(here)

I hope you’re staying safe and sane in these crazy times.

Clay