Two-Tone Pontiac With Ohio Tags #88

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

He'd have none of it in the beginning, nothing
but the feeling of electric destiny in his palm,
and those clunky, clumsy things without the
butterfly wing scales lifting finespun and
delicate on the breeze, free-floating and
falling with soft-puffing lung bellows of
near-sleep. Bursting with enough symbolist
lyricism to transport you to Mars. Now that's
the secret hidden power of language, my
friend, hidden that way in plain sight. Topless
time's been sneaky-suspended, and you feel a
bottomless well cracking and yawning up
beneath your feet, a dreamy invisible elevator
shaft to the center of the cosmos, or close
behind your navel, but you can't ever see.
Someone like you never can. What kind of
dime store hoodlums need these barebones
anthems anyway that stick in the throat? It's
the poor whites in the back of the train who
eventually notice how real world objects emit
sound and song, feeding on rattling breezes
and buckets of rainbows. We'll begin
timorously tomorrow to trade in a foreign
currency, for this is my mother-tongue, and
these words are gonna mean what I want
them to mean when I declare them to mean it
cos I want them to mean it. Just isolate any
single phrase from the chorus, pare it out
surgically, and try to say what it means
without writing some dumb new OCD
dissertation. Who needs anymore Santa Claus
songs or sonnets or Easter bonnets, make the
list and check it twice? But take away that
evanescent restraint and everything collapses
as any other topical diatribe that's ever eaten
your minutes like a crocodile chugging down
milkshake tumblers full of golden molasses.
You're forced at last to open eyes that do
more than see, ears that do more than hear,
tongues that do more than taste. You gotta
rip down the curtains and penetrate into a
new kind of consciousness and existence or
remain trapped between those who horde
scraps of meat and those who throw away
rusty iron ore. See, you can't linger way out
on the high wire forever, though something in
the structure defies simple comprehension of
the individual words and their special
relationships. Synergy. You gotta come back
down now and then, but there are suggestive
glances over rims of wine glasses that promise
so much more than they ever deliver. They'll
probably compare it mockingly to War and
Peace, overlooking the whispery, foreshadowy
hints of everything yet to come. Her eyes are
really some other color, you may have
noticed, this femme fatale out to crash
through you. Aural oscillations, aural
waveforms. What is this freakish Rimbaud
stuff supposed to be, anyway? What signify?
Start noodling on a general philosophy of life
and see where that carries you. Who's
exploited, baby? It may be a trick, or a crafty
device, but it's a good one; it works, it's got
you. We're all exploited! They couldn't latch
onto any crystal-clear imagery, and anyway
those moldy folkies had already gone to seed,
and they still demanded her dead as dust
ancient stocking ballads. She's some left over
character crudely trimmed out of Poe, her
borderline pornography tacitly understood,
desperately clawing about in secret places
lusting for salvation, just waiting for the
velour voice in pointed boots to come slyly
stepping in. See, your mind is chewing over
that one single line, struggling to grasp its
true and infinitely slick surface, isn't it? He
used to hijack his former girlfriend's concerts,
and that caused a lot of fuss just cos they'd
never heard it as a single, or on an album,
and they didn't know the words or the tune
under the hungry fingers of smirking, cold
cloud idolatry. Snags up in your fiberglass
consciousness and holds it hostage without
you ever guessing what's been done to you.
It's like they can hear without listening,
paragliding along the slick surface, absent
participants, and it's clearly the case cos
they're not instantly thrown into wild outright
rebellion and revolution. Aw, it's all too
complex for the soap and toothpaste hawkers,
jamming in these machine gun rhymes.